


Stranger Danger

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Awkward Relationship Smut, Awkwardness, Bisexuality, Chicago (City), Consensual Underage Sex, Creepy Pete, Falling In Love, Fluff, High School, Humor, Jailbait Patrick, Lust at First Sight, M/M, Mental Health Issues, POV Alternating, Peterick, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 14:56:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 22
Words: 48,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7512569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“How old are you?” Pete asks in his ear. Then: “You know what? I don’t think I wanna know.” </i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Patrick meets a sexy stranger at a show. Patrick lies about his age. Patrick makes out with the stranger in an alley. Patrick promises he'll come back. Is this the worst idea he's ever had, or the best?</p><p>*Underage Patrick, real-life age gap, everything consensual.*</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A wise man once said, "Everyone's repulsive about Patrick Stump." So here I am, being repulsive about Patrick Stump. I am going to try my best to finish what I'm starting here. I hope you guys enjoy it!

Like most of the important, life-altering events of his adolescence, it happens at a show. It‘s like a grungy urban fairy tale: thrashing in the pit, close enough that the drum beat in your chest and your bones and your blood, the world a smoky whirl of limbs and heat and sweat, the smell of bodies choking thick, the music and the movement all that matters. And if you get a black eye or a cracked rib or possibly trampled, well, that’s all part of the excitement. Another bruise to show in the locker room for third period gym class, to go with a voice worn out from screaming and a brand new t-shirt, traded for a grubby twenty, emblazoning his chest with a new pillar of musical obscurity. Patrick doesn’t know many kids whose parents let them go to shows in the city on school nights; hell, he _hopes_ for bruises. For bragging rights. He is a sixteen year-old with a babyface, and he has something to prove.

So anyway. The fairy tale. The pit is a slamming mash of other people and energy. There are bodies against his from all sides. There is one body in particular, a hot close presence knocking against his back no matter how he twists or turns. Patrick is trying to look back over his shoulder to see who’s riding him, who’s fucking with him, and a stray elbow catches him in the face. Patrick’s eye explodes; his head jerks back; his teeth snap shut on his tongue; he hits the floor.

The floor is a dangerous place. He catches himself on knees and splayed fingers, spitting blood onto slick concrete; immediately his fingers are crushed under two different types of boots and one bright green Chuck. Feet and knees pummel his sides, his back. He tries to get up but his head is whirling, his vision going in and out, the whole world a tangle of legs and impact. He could die down here. He resigns himself to death. And then a hand shoots down, steel-tipped fingers latching around his shoulder, and he’s pulled up out of the fray, to safety.

His rescuer drags him clear of the surge of slam-dancers and the hot crush of swaying concert-goers. The grip slides from his shoulder down his arm, fingers encircling his wrist. Patrick’s vision of a black figure throbs through the smoke and noise, and he allows himself to be led. They stop at the comparatively clear area around the bar, and his mysterious white knight sits him on a stool and buys a bottle of water to press into his hand before Patrick’s head has stopped spinning.

Patrick looks up at the man who has saved him. Dusky skin, dark hair, black-ringed green eyes searching his with concern and just a hint of hunger. Dressed all in black, but who in this room isn’t? Short bitten fingernails, painted black a while ago, chipped and grubby. Patrick hesitates, his gut uncertain, buzzing with tension. You aren’t supposed to take drinks from strangers, some tinny voice in his aching head cautions. Patrick isn’t sure if that applies to sealed bottles of water or not.

“You all right?” The suspiciously good Samaritan leans in close to be heard over the noise, putting his mouth so close to Patrick’s ear that his lips brush Patrick’s skin. Patrick feels briefly as if he might faint. His heart is racing harder than it had been when his death was imminent. “You’re bleeding.”

The man grins, pulling back from Patrick’s ear, eyes glittering in the low light. He brushes his thumb across Patrick’s lip. It comes back bloody. He shows it to Patrick, smirks, and licks his thumb clean.

And that’s it. He’s done for. Patrick Stumph is in love.

His heart hasn’t stopped thundering. He feels a little like a small, soft creature being hunted by something large and frightening and hungry. Nervously licking his own lip, those green eyes burning into him, he wonders if that is a metaphor or a correct assessment of the situation. The adrenalin of his proximity to this exciting, slightly creepy stranger and his near-death experience and the blow to his head combine to make it difficult to think straight.

“I think I’m okay!” Patrick shouts to be heard. The stranger takes the water from Patrick, cracks the bottle’s seal, and takes a sip. He puts it back in Patrick’s hand. They are exchanging an awful lot of fluids for a first date, Patrick thinks about saying. He hasn’t been hit on the head that hard, though. “I’m Patrick,” he says instead.

The stranger looks him over from head to foot, the intensity of his stare contributing to Patrick’s light-headedness. Patrick gulps down half the water in one go, trying not to think about whether he can taste the stranger’s mouth on the bottle. The man gives a little nod, almost to himself, and puts his mouth on Patrick’s ear again. Patrick is infinitely grateful that ears do not get goosebumps, because the rest of his sweaty body is prickling with them. “Pete,” says the stranger, lips so, so soft as they brush against Patrick’s ear. The ear is a part of the body, Patrick reflects, that is not often touched. That is unaccustomed to the touch of strangers and therefore particularly sensitive.

“How old are you?” Pete asks in his ear. The effect is that of dumping a bucket of ice water on Patrick’s crotch. It is not a question that young people ask. Or at least, Patrick wouldn’t have thought to ask it. How old is _this_ guy? It suddenly seems like a deeply pertinent question. Older than sixteen, that much is certain. Eighteen, maybe? The creepiness factor rises. Not _nineteen_.

But it’s not like a lot of high schoolers go to weeknight shows. Hadn’t he been proud of that very fact earlier this evening? “Oh god,” Patrick moans, too softly to be heard over the noise. What if this guy is a sexual predator? What if he’s being sexually preyed upon and hasn’t even noticed? This guy could be a pedophile. This guy could be looking for an easy target to _molest_.

“You know what? I don’t think I wanna know,” Pete says. His voice is amazingly sexy. Amazingly, sexually predatorily sexy. “You want to get out of here?”

Maybe the concussion is wearing off, because Patrick finally has enough sense to recoil, to slip off his bar stool and take a step back. _Danger, Will Robinson._ There’s a bartender hovering around anyway, whose glance keeps flicking to Patrick’s hand, looking for a stamp. The last thing he wants right now is to be asked for an ID. With his age on it. And his full name. And his home address. He shoots a panicky look at the leering sexual predator and blurts out shrilly, “TWENTY-FIVE!”

This is so plainly a lie Pete should laugh in Patrick’s face. But instead he gives him a measuring look and nods slowly. Then he loops his hand around Patrick’s wrist again and leads him out the door.

A few dream-like moments later they are out in the ringing silence of a chilly Chicago night. Pete looks tired under the glare of the streetlights. Patrick wishes wildly, irrationally, that he had a cigarette to smoke. It’s what people do in alleys outside clubs—cool, grown-up 25 year-old people. Additionally, in a pinch, he could stick the lit end of it in Pete’s eye and run for safety.

Patrick doesn’t even want to think about how young and stupid he must look, shivering in the light.

Now that they’re alone, in the light, in the silence, things are awkward. The easy intimacy of the close, dark club is gone. Patrick is acutely aware of being alone out in the night with a pedophile. It is almost exactly the kind of scenario he has always been told to avoid.

“So do you live around here?” Patrick squeaks out nervously at the same moment Pete asks, “So do you like the band?” Neither knows which question to answer. The silence stretches between them again. Patrick bites his lip. Pete makes a small sound in his throat and suddenly his mouth is on Patrick’s, Patrick’s back is against the brick alley wall, their teeth and tongues are touching, both mouths filling up with the metallic aftertaste of Patrick’s blood. It is hot, needy, close; Patrick still hasn’t decided whether he should kiss back or run away screaming when it is over. Pete pulls back, breathing hard, breath fogging the air, looking at Patrick almost accusingly. Patrick mentally files lip-biting in his Sexy Moves and Maneuvers rolodex.

“Almost midnight,” Pete says, half-smiling, looking half-haunted. Patrick’s danger-o-meter and hard-on indicator seem to have tangled their wires. “Come home with me.”

Patrick’s back tingles with impressions of the brick wall, his mouth tasting faintly of almonds and the stranger’s saliva. Because he is stupid and foolish and apparently _wants_ to wake up in a bathtub of ice sans kidneys, he aches to say _yes_. Because he is scared and a virgin and his parents would kill him, he bursts out in a nervous, dizzy rush, “It’s a school night.”

Pete’s brow raises quizzically, but he gives a wicked smile, deciding Patrick is being coy. “I’ll drop you off at the bus stop first thing in the morning. Scout’s honor. I’ll even pack you a lunch.”

“I can’t,” Patrick starts to say, relief and regret both, and Pete’s mouth is on his neck before he gets the words out. He finishes on a bit of a moan, Pete’s teeth scraping his collarbone. “I can’t,” he repeats with even less conviction, panting a little this time.

Pete pulls away, looking at Patrick with doe eyes, adopting a very convincing, very dangerous, pout. His voice is husky when he speaks. “Okay,” he says, giving in, giving up. “We’ll do this right. You’re special, Patrick. Knew it since you walked in the door. So I’ll be a gentleman.” With a flourish, Pete sweeps into a ridiculous bow and kisses Patrick’s hand, lips leaving a burning imprint behind. He doesn’t let go of Patrick’s hand. His green eyes sear into Patrick’s own. “Come see me,” he implores. A note of pleading in his voice. “Promise you’ll come see me.”

“All—all right,” Patrick squeaks. _Stupid, stupid_ , he chastises himself. How is he going to do that? Hop a train after school and come pretend not to be a junior in high school? How would he explain that to his mother, his friends? Who knew what this guy, this feeling-up-strangers-in-alleyways guy, would do to him? Would expect him to do? But his mouth says, “I promise.”

They exchange phone numbers. Pete, deadly serious, writes his number on Patrick’s hand with bitten-lip concentration, and scribbles Patrick’s first and last name as well as number on his own. The press of pen on his skin makes the hair on Patrick’s arms stand up, his spine shiver. Patrick keeps waiting for someone to come around the corner, to arrest them, something. “I will see you again, Patrick Stumph,” Pete swears solemnly. Then he kisses Patrick chastely on the cheek—as chaste as the lengths of their bodies pressed together and his lips warm and full on his cheek can be—the hard-on-o-meter straining at MAX, the lever wavering, the little spring threatening to snap, Patrick knows with a shiver of excitement and shame that Pete must feel it—and slips away into the night. He looks back no less than three times, looks back at Patrick standing stunned and shell-shocked and slack-jawed in the alley, missing the show, almost certainly concussed, trying to wrap his head around what just happened and why he liked to so, so much.


	2. Chapter 2

It is Patrick’s first hickey, and it is not what he had had in mind for showing off in the locker room. He studies his reflection surreptitiously. Luckily for him, his right eye is swollen so badly from the elbow he’d taken to the face that his mother had not even noticed the leech-mark on his neck this morning. He’d had a hard enough time explaining the swollen eye. He doesn’t know what he would’ve said about this other thing.

He’d kept it hidden pretty well throughout the first two periods of the day by zipping his tech vest unusually high. It was either that or an ornamental scarf, and he’s already known as a kid who wears puffy vests, so. But gym class bared all.  Smeared with Titans blue-and-gold, his loose-necked baggy gym shirt and mesh shorts leave nothing to the imagination. His bruised face hits merry harmonies with the navy blue, and the mark on his neck basically pulsates like a beacon. _Maybe it looks like a bruise_ , Patrick tries to console himself. _A mouth-shaped neck bruise._

His friend Joe comes up behind him while he stands evaluating the severity of the situation in the mirror and slaps him on the shoulder, whistling. “Patrick Stumph got lucky!” he whoops. Joe grins, expectant of details. Patrick wills himself to blink out of existence. Instead, the five-minute bell rings and they have to run for the main gymnasium, lest they be marked late.

Saved by the bell, but not for long. For the duration of his gym class Patrick is subject to heckling and intrusive questions and raised eyebrows from all sides, even people he doesn’t know very well, even people he doesn’t know at _all_ , including the girls’ volleyball coach. When the period finally ends, he cannot get back into his vest fast enough.

But word spreads. By ninth period a girl he knows only loosely and whom he suspects of having at least one venereal disease actually touches him on the arm and whispers conspiratorially into his ear, “So I hear you’re the new school slut.”

That is the last straw. Patrick is moving to Canada and changing his name and never, ever setting foot in Glenbrook South again. He begins developing a new signature for his life as Drake Kindly, Canadian man of mystery. He tries out different accents on the bus home, which is a pretty good example of why he doesn’t have more friends.

He’s only just stepped in the door, vest zipped to its utmost, when his mother yells from somewhere upstairs, “Patrick? Phone!”

Patrick bee-lines to her first-floor office, which has glass-paned French doors that lock. He grabs the cordless handset from the kitchen as he goes. Patrick has no idea who is calling him or what about, but his mother’s office is the best tactical choice for calls, the most defensible against eavesdroppers. He has been described as paranoid in the past. On the other hand, both Mom and Megan had listened in, giggling on the upstairs extension, the first time he’d ever asked a girl to go out with him. She had not said yes. The role played by two disembodied females breathing and snickering in this refusal was never satisfactorily established.

To be extra-safe, Patrick locks the doors behind him and gets under his mom’s desk with the cordless. He is not clear on how exactly this will improve matters, but he isn’t taking any chances.

From deep within the fortress of solitude, he picks up the phone and says, “Hello?”

“Patrick? Did you pick up?” His mother.

“Yes. Thank you. Good-bye,” Patrick says through clenched teeth.

Mercifully, she hangs up the phone. He hears the click. “I’ve been calling all day,” a low, amused-sounding voice comes over the line. “That woman keeps answering.”

_Pete_. It’s fucking _Pete_. Creepy Pete from the show. Gorgeous, beautiful, sexy, Pete from the show. Pete whom Patrick has told he is twenty-five years old for some insane reason. No wonder he had a wild impulse to hide under a desk.

“That’s my—receptionist,” Patrick squeaks out, voice cracking. Pete had been calling _all day_. This is both thrilling and a little desperate; it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since they met. Patrick has had only limited experience in dating but he’s pretty sure that isn’t the way you’re supposed to play it. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t mind.

Pete laughs softly, not like he’s laughing at Patrick but like Patrick has just told a joke. “It’s cool, man. I know a lot of guys our age who live at home.”

_Our age_. Patrick wonders why he said it. Obviously to everyone, he is not twenty-five; he looks thirteen years old on a good day. So why did Pete say it? Is he giving Patrick an opportunity to come clean, or is he saying it doesn’t matter? Or is he giving Patrick the benefit of the doubt? Going to weeknight shows downtown and making out with strangers in alleys: maybe Pete has rightly inferred that this is the behavior of an older—at the very least, a statutorily legal—man. Maybe he figures Patrick really _is_ his age, whatever that is.

“Oh. Uh,” Patrick says brilliantly. “Yeah. That’s my mom.”

Pete laughs again, this low vibrating sound that prickles the hair on Patrick’s arms. “So where have you been all day? Band practice?”

Patrick tries to remember if he’d told Pete he was in a band. His mind gets a little hazy on everything that surrounded the kissing, though. It is possible that this is one of the many lies he told last night. But holy shit, _Pete from the show is calling him at home_ , and it’s difficult to think. He’s trying to think of a nonchalant way of saying ‘I’m in high school’ when Pete stops every thought dead in its tracks.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” Pete murmurs. “Too soon to call, right? But god, you’ve been in my head all day.”

Patrick hears a whimper escape his own lips. Pete’s voice twinkles, playful, as if it’s all a joke. The tips of Patrick’s ears burn. He tries to think of something sexy to say. “You’ve been on my neck,” he finally manages, sounding awkward and embarrassed and not even remotely smooth. “There’s, uh, I’ve got a hickey.”

Pete practically purrs with delight. Patrick imagines him stretched out in the sun like a cat, warm and sleepy and satisfied. “So people can see that I marked you. That I’ve staked a claim.”

Patrick’s skin prickles all up his arms and down his back at the thought. He imagines a flagpole jutting out of his back, Pete’s white teeth bared in a sparkling grin where it flapped in the wind. He’d lay there wheezing for breath, impaled, smiling woozily, deliriously glad to belong to someone. Then he feels like an idiot. Wildly, he says, “Claim? I’m a wild, uncharted territory, my friend.” He can’t tell if he’s being sexy or dorky. He feels a little reckless, like he’s drunk, and he’s only moments from blurting out _why don’t you stick a flag in me before you call me yours_ or something equally horrifying.

“Is that a challenge?” Pete asks. There’s no question about him—definitely sexy. As usual, Patrick has no idea what to say. He has no coy response prepared because, as a rule, he does not find himself in the position to respond coyly very often—well, ever. For a panicked moment he considers hanging up the phone. _Yes_ would be the equivalent of _stick a flag in me, baby_. _No_ would be too pathetic for words.

Luckily for Patrick, flirting, apparently, is _intended_ to be an exhilarating string of rhetorical questions and awkward silences and sweating palms. By the time Patrick has stumbled his way onto the stunningly witty riposte _it could be_ , Pete’s moved on to the next brazen come-on.

“Come see me,” he says, an echo of his earlier insistence, when he’d clasped Patrick’s hands in an alleyway and tried to tug him along into full frontal debauchery.

All of the reasons why this is a bad idea rush to the forefront of Patrick’s brain at once, unbalancing it, causing fear and excuses to slide to the back of his throat and acquiescence to slide to the front, buzzing against his lips, trapped by his teeth but not for long. With effort he says, “Convince me.”

“Many ways to convince you spring to mind,” Pete says sagely, sexily. “But I’m not sure how effective they’ll be with you so far away.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Patrick says. His head is fuzzy and white. Fainting is a real risk. All the blood in his body is racing to his junk and his brain is suffocating. He’s so hard right now he feels like he’s going to start bleeding from the nose. Hunched under his mother’s desk he shifts, causing a painful/erotic rub against the zipper of his jeans.  Patrick wonders if he is about to have phone sex. He had not previously been aware that this was an activity he was interested in, but he now feels empowered to report that he is very, very interested. The hand that isn’t holding the phone hovers in the vicinity of his belt. He wets his lips with his tongue.

Then the least sexy thing he can imagine happens. His mother picks up the other extension and says, “Patrick, hon, I need to use the phone.”

“IN A MINUTE, MOM!” he yelps, losing all semblance of dignity and his erection in one split second of terror.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Stumph,” says Pete. It is the worst moment of Patrick’s life.

“HANG UP THE PHONE RIGHT NOW, MOM,” he shouts into the phone, scrambling out from under the desk with a hazy plan to tackle his mother and wrest the other phone from her hands.

“Who is this?” Patrick’s mother asks, with the air of a woman who has no intention of hanging up the phone. “I thought I knew all of Patrick’s friends.”

“I’m new,” Pete says, sounding impossibly charming. Patrick can _hear_ his dangerous, sexy grin. Worse, he can hear it working. On his _mother_. “I’m Pete, Pete Wentz. I’m trying to convince Patrick to—”

_Thisisn’thappeningthisisnothappening_ , Patrick chants to himself. Unfortunately his chanting seems to have no measurable effect on reality. “I thought you wanted me to get off the phone!” he protests loudly, hoping he is able to block out anything incriminating from either side. He has spent less than 24 hours living in a web of lies and he is already breaking from the stress. He runs up the stairs, hunting for his mother. This is why people leading double lives are always orphans, he decides. Bruce Wayne never had to deal with this shit.

“My bus is pulling up anyway,” Pete says as Patrick runs down the hall to his mother’s bedroom. “It was nice talking to you both. See you soon, ‘Trick.”

Pete hangs up the phone just as Patrick bursts into his mother’s room. She is holding the phone next to her head with her lips pursed in a little smirk Patrick decides right then he despises. “I cannot believe you did that to me,” he accuses, out of breath from his goddamn sprint. “Seriously, what if I was Batman?”

Patrick isn’t making sense but his mother doesn’t even notice. Instead she is smirking at him and asking in this gooey, know-it-all voice, “So, ‘’Trick’, who’s this Pete? He sounds _handsome_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't help myself, guys. I hope you can't either.


	3. Chapter 3

Historically, being told he can’t have something has only ever made Pete want it more. Which is to say that after two weeks of phone seduction, coy wheedling, and abject groveling, after two weeks of vague excuses, equivocation, and outright refusal, Pete is rabid. Desperate. Feral. He waits at Union Station feeling savage and unhinged, feeling equally likely to great Patrick with a cool hello and to jump on him and try to lick his secrets from his mouth in plain daylight, in front of God and everyone.

Feeling very much like a predator.

Patrick steps off the train and immediately starts blushing. Pete recognizes his shaggy haircut and flushed cheeks above anything else. He’d been remembering him taller, icier. Pete is pleased to be wrong. Pleased to have something new to commit to memory. Patrick is short and earnest and uncertain, disembarking in a brown canvas jacket, baby blue t-shirt, and wickedly tight jeans. His cheeks are round and red, his lips so naturally pink and swollen Pete can’t quite believe they’re real. He’s holding a guitar case in front of him like a shield, protected from the back by an overstuffed backpack. Something swells up in Pete’s chest—love or madness. He wants to give Patrick something, shower him with gifts. He wants to take things too.

Pete pulls off his knit cap, thinking this will make him more identifiable, thinking that his long straightened bangs and eyeliner and honey-gold skin might not be enough to make him stand out. He balls the cap in a sweaty black-nailed hand, not knowing what to expect from himself. The back of his hair stands up, staticked. He tugs on the bottom of his black zippered hoodie and then Patrick’s eyes meet his across the crowd of debarking passengers and there’s no time to prepare. Pete’s heart is juddering violently against his lungs and his whole body is tensed to spring and he’s just fucking beaming, grinning at this kid like he’s the messiah, grinning his face off. He is not playing it cool. He blurts out, “You look amazing. I’m so glad you’re here.”

Patrick keeps a safe distance, putting his guitar case between them. Pete isn’t sure if this is a good thing or not. On the one hand it makes the risk of him mauling Patrick plummet. On the other hand he really thinks he’d enjoy mauling Patrick.

“Uh, hi,” says Patrick. Pete wishes he’d thought of that line. It is normal, for one thing, and charming as hell. The few feet between them seem an impossible distance, like toil of a thousand years wouldn’t bring Pete close enough to touch him. Pete suspiciously checks Patrick’s neck for evidence that he has left a permanent mark. The things he feels scare him. He worries that he will ruin this perfect boy, that his touch is enough to sear, to scar, to disfigure. Sometimes Pete doesn’t do too well on his own.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he echoes himself, meaning it. He means everything too much. He’s working on it.

Patrick surprises him, showing his teeth suddenly in a melting smile. “Me too,” he says. “But I can’t stay long. I’ve got to catch the 8:30 train back.”

“Then there’s no time to waste,” Pete says to mask his keenly felt disappointment. He had not thought that far ahead—had not considered what it would feel like when Patrick arriving turned into Patrick leaving. Pete decides not to do so now, either.

With a dramatic flourish, he unzips his hoodie, revealing a collared white shirt and black tie beneath. He offers Patrick his arm, with every intention of promenading out of Union Station. Patrick looks him over with a panicky look that Pete finds very exciting. “You look _nice_ ,” Patrick accuses. “I didn’t know this was a black tie thing.”

“This,” Pete says very seriously, “is to be an evening of grand romance. I’m taking you to my favorite club.”

Patrick blanches. “You mean like a bar?”

Pete has taken Patrick by the elbow and is steering him towards street-level. “Almost exactly like a bar, yes,” he says.  Pete can feel himself being creepy, grinning like a lunatic. Patrick is probably wondering right now whether he’s about to be serially murdered. But Pete wants him to know that he is taking this seriously. So he turns off the mega-watt grin, stops walking, and looks hard into Patrick’s eyes. “I want—you make me want to do it right. I’m serious about you.”

Patrick visibly swallows, like a cartoon character. Pete feels a pang of characteristic regret for his characteristic emotional recklessness. He knows he is a lot to handle. He does not know how to turn it down. _He’s working on it._ “I’m taking you on the best first date I could think of,” he explains, trying to de-escalate his own intensity. No luck: the word ‘date’ makes Patrick’s ears blush. It is so delicious Pete cannot stop himself from making it worse. “It’s 1940s night at The Green Mill. Darling, we’re going dancing.”

They’re climbing the steps out of Union Station before Patrick asks, rather squeakily, “Is it an all-ages club?”

“I don’t think so,” Pete says obliviously. “Does that matter to old men like us?”

Patrick has stopped walking. He takes a deep breath. He delivers a very unconvincing lie. “I’m just—I mean, I partied so hard when I turned 21. Too hard, really. So I’m kind of over the bar scene, you know?” As Patrick rambles, he is turning pinker and pinker.

Pete raises his eyebrows and just looks at Patrick. Pete has never heard anyone say that except for people who aren’t old enough to get into bars. Suspicion, one of the least-utilized tools in Pete’s arsenal, flickers drowsily to life. “You aren’t 21 yet, are you,” he guesses. The look of utter horror on Patrick’s face suggests that it is a good guess. “I can get you in anyway,” Pete suggests, flashing a sexy pout at an imaginary bouncer. “Just this once,” he says in a light, flirty voice. “My friend is just so pretty, it makes him forgetful.”

Patrick squirms in his skin, obviously uncomfortable with the idea. A wicked thought strikes Pete, his lips curling to reveal a toothy grin. Pete has a better idea. He discards the grand evening of romance plan like it’s old laundry. Pete eyes Patrick out of the corner of his eye. There is something bright and tense and sparkling in his belly. There is a knot of excitement and exhilaration growing there.

“I can see that this plan makes you uncomfortable,” Pete says reasonably, as if he is a reasonable man thinking reasonable thoughts, which he decisively is not. “So I propose a new one.” He whirls Patrick around so they are heading in the opposite direction down the sidewalk. Patrick’s guitar case nearly takes out a scowling businessman. “Let’s just go to my place. No bouncer there, and no cover either. You can serenade me. We can jam.”

Patrick looks immensely relieved. “Yeah, okay,” he says. Then fear re-enters his eyes. Pete finds this unspeakably exciting. “Um, so, do you have roommates, or…?”

“Don’t worry,” Pete says, and he can _feel_ himself leering but is unable to stop, “we’ll be alone.”

Pete stops to trade a few crumpled dollar bills for a rose. The rumpled-looking man selling the flowers gives Patrick a knowing grin. Pete presents the rose to Patrick ceremoniously, so that he knows romance is not entirely out of the picture. Pete realizes that a gentleman would have offered to carry something, so he pulls Patrick’s guitar case out of his hands without asking. Patrick twirls the rose, smiling in spite of himself. The silly, happy grin pushes almost all of the worry out of his eyes. But he wants to say something, Pete can tell. Pete holds his tongue, trying to give Patrick enough space to say whatever it is he’s thinking. Pete is aware that he can be… overwhelming. He tries very hard to be smaller, to allow Patrick to speak.

It takes two blocks of silence that Pete finds very companionable but that seem to make Patrick sweat before he finds the words. “So about me being underage,” Patrick begins, voice high and strained, before faltering.

“I’m 22,” Pete volunteers, trying to make it easier, make it less of a big deal. “I don’t mind that you aren’t 25. I’m not really into older guys anyway. Obviously, for _you_ , I would make an exception. But it’ll probably be easier, if there aren’t big gaps in our levels of maturity and experience, right?”

Patrick’s face is flaming, now the same color as the rose. “Um,” he says miserably. Pete gets the distinct impression that he has made things worse. He isn’t sure what else to say. All he can think about, literally the only thought he can keep in his head for any amount of time, is about what he will say, when he and Patrick are standing in his shitty apartment alone. What he will do. He will close the distance between them with a few decisive steps. He will look into Patrick’s eyes. He will cup his hands around Patrick’s face. He will bring his lips to Patrick’s. He has a futon in his apartment, is trying to decide in advance if this will be a couch-type evening or a bed-type evening, is glad to have the furniture versatility for either or both.

Currently, Pete is thinking that Patrick wouldn’t be here, would not have come all this way, if it wasn’t at least a couch-level scenario. Currently, between Patrick’s beestung lips and windburnt cheeks, Pete is thinking that he will be very impressed with himself if he even makes it to the apartment, to the couch. The things he wants to do to Patrick, he would do in an alley. In a Starbucks bathroom. In a moderately secluded park. In the middle of the street. His veins run with fire, his skin itching with friction. If he doesn’t kiss Patrick, and soon, he believes that he will die.

“Um,” says Patrick again. Through a haze of heat Pete wonders why they are still on the street, why they still have clothes on, why they must get on the El to get to his apartment, why that will take at least twenty minutes, why they haven’t just found the nearest hotel room. Why standing so close to Patrick makes him feel like he is drowning and burning all at once.

Now looking sweaty and greenish, Patrick blurts out, “What would you say if I told you… if it turned out, strictly speaking, I was still… in high school?”

“Well, I’d be a little hurt you haven’t asked me to prom yet,” Pete says, joking. A moment after it goes stale between them he realizes Patrick may have been serious. Patrick miserably pinches thorns off the stem of his rose. “Oh, _fuck_ me,” Pete says, then immediately regrets his word choice. “Or—I mean—don’t, definitely don’t, that was _not_ a proposition—” He glances around wildly, hoping to god there are no policemen in earshot. He would prefer it not be a jail-bunk-level evening.

Did he ever believe Patrick was 25? Did he ever really think about it? What were a few years, anyway? It hadn’t seemed important. Now he wishes he didn’t have to ask, didn’t have to know. They have not even made it to the El station and his whole evening is coming off the rails (elevated train puns notwithstanding; he is _nailing_ those), and it is literally only a five minute walk from Union to the Blue Line.

Patrick’s miserable silence is sucking all the air out of the city. No one can breathe. “But there _are_ eighteen year-olds in high school,” Pete ventures, hopeful/desperate.

“I’m not one of them,” says Patrick. He is a hangdog picture of regret. Why did he have to stop lying all at once, Pete wonders. Why not tell the truth a little bit at a time, some of it at Union Station, some of it on the El, some of it on Pete’s futon, some of it in the morning…

These are literally criminal thoughts. Pete wishes someone would slap him on the wrist because he does not seem to be able to do it himself. His brain is racing with calculations and calibrations, trying to get a reading on the index of How Not Okay This Is. “I feel like this would have been pertinent information to share previously,” he hears himself say. He sounds more sarcastic than he would like. “For example: _prior_ to getting on the train. Another great example: prior to me putting my tongue in your—your jailbait mouth.”

“We could still just hang out at your place,” Patrick offers weakly, maybe trying to salvage their date, maybe trying to apologize. “You said—you said you didn’t want to know,” he adds.

Pete discovers he is angry. “My place?” He spits the words like venom. “Are you even seventeen or is this a statutory rape situation?”

Patrick’s entire face flames red and he stares at the ground, scandalized and shamed. People step around them on the sidewalk. Pete stands there on the street, yelling at some kid he barely knows about rape, and life goes on around them. Just having this conversation is probably enough to get Pete on the sex offender registry. He just—he just doesn’t need this right now. It’s not like he sees true love in every mosh pit. It’s not like this is an everyday occurrence for him. Present circumstances aside, he is _not_ a predator. He does not generally make out with strangers in alleys. Patrick is—Patrick is—Pete can’t bear the thought of finding him just to lose him. It feels like flat-out mockery. It feels _cruel_.

Pete feels like being cruel right back. He looks at the miserable shame-faced desecrated kid in front of him, tears stinging in his stupidly pretty eyes, half-plucked rose squeezed in his fist. “I didn’t come here to have sex with you,” Patrick is whispering. “I mean—I don’t know if I did or not—but. But I thought you _liked_ me. I thought—” A tear falls and Patrick wipes it away with the back of his hand. Patrick stares at his own shoelaces. “People are staring. Please stop yelling at me,” he whispers.

Pete does not feel like being cruel anymore.

He comforts Patrick automatically, by instinct. He takes his balled-up knit cap and sets it gingerly on Patrick’s head, covering up the burning ears like it can cover up the shame Pete has made him feel. What a sorry fucking way to repay an angel for appearing stageside, like magic, like lightning on a clear day, like a bullet to the heart. To Pete’s heart. What a sorry fucking way to show him how glad Pete is he’s here, in the universe to begin with, in Chicago particularly, standing beside Pete most of all.

“I just need a minute to think about this,” Pete says. “You understand that this… puts me in a weird position. Don’t you?” The words sound hollow, blaming. He isn’t trying to blame Patrick. At the same time he’s choking on the sense of what he’s losing, what’s he lost. At the same time he’s not entirely convinced this has to change anything. Does it?

“I’ll just grab the next train back,” Patrick tells the sidewalk. He adjusts Pete’s hat, tugging it lower over his eyes. Everything about this breaks Pete’s heart.

“Or,” Pete’s mouth says before his brain has a chance to weigh in, “you could stay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out I just can't stop writing this??? I hope you like it! Comments give me life!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently my goal here is to make each of us into Pete Wentz. I literally cannot stop. Send help.

By mutual agreement, they start the evening over. It goes well, Patrick thinks dazedly to himself on the 8:30 train home. He does not have any neck hickeys this time. Pete left them on his chest and hips instead. Patrick’s pretty sure he was less careful about Pete’s neck, and also pretty sure Pete did not mind. _Let’s just agree right now that anything below the waist is illegal, and anything belt-up is just guys being dudes,_ Pete had suggested when they’d gotten to his apartment, after a moment or two of shifting their weight awkwardly in silence. Patrick, whose hard-on had lasted the entire El ride and also the trip up three flights of stairs to Pete’s shitty apartment, was both disappointed and relieved by this suggestion.

Pete had taken off his own shirt carelessly, tearing off the tie and undoing his buttons haphazardly, revealing a tattooed necklace of thorns that made Patrick weak in the knees. Patrick had been too nervous to put down the guitar case until Pete, gently, asking, _Is this okay_ , had taken it from him. Pete leaned it tenderly against the wall, as if showing with every movement how careful he was prepared to be with Patrick. He came back, hovered in front of Patrick, head cocked in a question but not touching. Shakily, Patrick had taken Pete’s hands and drawn them to his own waist, placing them just slightly under the hem of his t-shirt. This used up all of Patrick’s courage. It seemed like it took more energy and effort for Pete to restrain himself than it did to _do_ , to touch; but still, it was with agonizing slowness and feather-soft touches that Pete lifted Patrick’s shirt over his head, with reverence that Pete stroked Patrick’s bared chest, stomach, skin. Pete’s face full of wonder, his hands fluttering around Patrick’s face, ghosting around his cheeks and chin til Patrick whimpered from the _absence_ of touching, til Patrick could have begged, til Patrick’s courage returned in a thousand-volt rush and he surged into Pete, crashing their mouths together, kissing him full-force, pushing him down onto the couch, covering Pete’s body with his hands, covering Pete’s tattoos with his mouth…

By himself on the 8:30 commuter train, Patrick begins to blush. He exhales shakily. They had lain on the couch and kissed for hours, til both their mouths were swollen, til Patrick’s limbs were heavy and sluggish and stiff, til his whole body throbbed from the crotch outwards. Patrick put his head on Pete’s heartbeat and they laid together in the quiet, in each other’s arms, Pete sighing contentedly and lightly touching Patrick’s hair as if he could not quite believe Patrick was real. Both realizing they were ravenous at once, they fell on Pete’s tiny kitchen like locusts and had a feast of pizza rolls and chips and salsa— _I’m really sorry I didn’t go to the grocery store, I swear I didn’t plan this, I was going to buy you dinner, I should warn you I’m a human disaster_ —said Pete; _I would literally eat chips and salsa for every meal, I don’t know what you’re talking about_ , said Patrick back. Patrick had played his guitar for a song or two; Pete had picked up his bass, sunk his chin into his chest, closed his eyes and begun to follow along, feeling it out. And then before either of them were ready it was time to leave, to go back to the train station, for Patrick to go back to the terrible, terrible, Pete-less suburbs. Patrick fought an absurd longing to stay. He kissed Pete recklessly and with bruising force on the train platform, in front of everyone. Pete bought him a second rose since he’d anxiously wrung the neck of the first one. And then Patrick was on the train, sailing away from romance and sex and Pete’s melting eyes, sailing back towards high school and lying to his parents and mundanity. _Come back_ , Pete had begged against his lips while the conductor cleared his throat because the doors were about to close and anyone planning on going to the terrible, terrible suburbs that night had damn well better get on the train. _Promise you’ll come back_.

Patrick Stumph is not sure what the fuck just happened to him, but he _is_ sure he liked it very, very much. All he can think about is how and when he can get out to do it again, and how soon he can steal all the extensions in the house and engineer some phone sex in the meantime.

At least, that’s all he can think about until he lets himself in the front door of his house and finds his sister Megan sitting on the stairs in the foyer, pajama-clad arms crossed over her chest, looking dangerously smug. “I know you weren’t at Joe’s house tonight,” she says. “I know you lied to Mom.”

Patrick Stumph is not sure what the fuck just happened to him, but he _is_ sure he is absolutely, totally, irrevocably _dead_.

 

“Tell me what you think you know or I’m not dealing.”

“Agree to drive me wherever I want to go, whenever I want to go, and do all my chores for a month and no one ever has to hear a word of it.”

“There is no way anyone would agree to that, Megan. How do I even know that _you_ even know whether or not I even _did_ anything wrong?”

“Well if you’d been at Joe’s like you _told Mom you would be_ you wouldn’t even be having this conversation with me, so—”

“Not true! Sometimes I listen to your stupid theories for the sheer entertainment of it, god knows there’s not much else to do in the suburbs!”

“So you _were_ in the city! Aha! I knew it.”

“You did not! You _do_ not. You have proof of nothing.”

It is with unbearable smugness that Megan whips a folded piece of paper out of the pocket of her pink, fuzzy bathrobe. She hands it to Patrick. Patrick opens it and sees a printout of Google Maps, of the search he had done that morning to get optimal directions to and from Pete’s apartment, just in case Pete turned out to be a rapist and he’d needed to know his own way out of there. He has an identical copy in his back pocket. Really, it was a smart move if you were going to insist on putting yourself in possibly dangerous, possibly sexual (possibly dangerously sexual; possibly sexually dangerous) situations with strangers who think you are 25, and Patrick is a little hurt that Megan is holding it against him. He feels he deserves some sort of accolades for this forethought, not blackmail. Although it would have been much cleverer if he hadn’t left the browser window open, he is willing to admit.

“Okay, so all you have proof of is that someone in this family was curious about some random address in Logan Square,” he revises his earlier assertion.

If Megan looked any more smug, Patrick thinks, her face would implode, creating a black hole that would mercifully destroy all life in the known universe.

“Oh, is that the neighborhood this address is in? I’m asking because _it doesn’t say Logan Square on this print-out_.” Megan is grinning, showing her braces, which twinkle evilly. She thinks she has won.

Patrick is torn between two competing desires: the desire not to have to drive Megan and her stupid friends around and the desire not to have his parents find out he lied to them and went to Chicago to _be with_ a much older man in a more-or-less sexual sense of the phrase. It might seem like a no-brainer, but it is not. Patrick really does not like Megan’s friends. Not only are they incredibly shrill, one of them has a crush on him and the other two are always making fun of her for it. _Loudly_. It isn’t comfortable.

“For your information, I am exceedingly familiar with Chicago neighborhoods,” Patrick lies badly. “I’ve been—studying them. I have a map.”

Megan just looks at him. “Two weeks and I don’t show this to Mom.”

“Two _weeks_? Megan, do you have any idea how short a human life is? Even if I live til 90, two weeks is like… a big percentage of that.” If he was hoping to frighten her with the specter of mortality, the hope is quickly dashed.

“Like less than one percent,” she says. Patrick had not previously been aware his little sister was some kind of super-savant mathematical genius, and deeply resents this discovery. “What percentage of your life do you think Mom will ground you for if she finds out you lied to her and went to Chicago alone?”

A shipwrecked man, Patrick seizes the one bit of this wreckage he can float on. _Alone_. As long as Megan thinks he was alone, his parents will probably not actually murder him. Although dismemberment is still a possibility. “One week, and that’s the best offer you’re going to get.”

Megan thinks this offer over for longer than Patrick is comfortable with. At last, she gives him the print-out and shakes his hand. “One week of rides wherever and whenever I want them, _and_ you have to do my chores,” she reminds him.

“If I find out you have another copy of this somewhere, so help you god,” Patrick threatens. Judging by the look on Megan’s face, he is not very scary.

 

Patrick can’t sleep. Now that his sister has become an international super spy, what if it’s harder to get away? Worse, what if she gets mad at him and _does_ tell his mom, and he’s grounded? What if he doesn’t get to see Pete again? It’s not like he can have Pete come to his house. Patrick almost laughs, imagining Pete showing up at the door, flowers for his mom, wearing his wrinkled shirt and crooked tie, twenty-two years old.

The horror that chases that thought is sobering, for a moment. Patrick remembers the joke Pete made about taking him to prom. Actually, it would be kind of nice to go to prom with someone, but it’s not like he can bring Pete. It’s not like Pete would _want_ to go, first of all, or like he could legally attend, secondly. There are a lot of normal things Patrick won’t be able to do with Pete. Like go to an R movie (which Patrick obviously can’t do anyway, but he imagines adults might sometimes do on, you know, dates). Like introduce him to his parents, _ever_. Like hold hands in front of a police officer. Or really go out in public much at all.

_Whoa whoa whoa whoa_ , Patrick tells himself. _Slow down_. It’s not like Pete is his boyfriend. It’s not like Pete even wants to be his boyfriend. Pete is just a… a… a weird complicated sex friend. Who wanted to take him on a romantic date. Who is five years older than Patrick (who will not even reach the age of consent in the state of Illinois for another _two and a half months_ ). What could possibly go wrong in this scenario?

So here’s Patrick, half-panicked thinking about whether Megan will turn him in and half-aroused remembering all the different ways different parts of Pete touched him just hours earlier and wholly too wired to sleep _ever_ again, and there’s only one person in the world he wants to talk to, even if it _is_ the moral equivalent of setting himself on fire.

Patrick sneaks out of bed, slinks downstairs into his mother’s office, and calls Pete.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think the most appropriate name for this genre is "awkward relationship smut." This is quickly turning into a different story than the short, sexy thing I thought I was writing. I am literally writing instead of eating and sleeping. I have filled over 50 notebook pages since, like, Thursday. I would be typing it for you more quickly except of how I can't put down the pen for long enough to do--anything. I HOPE YOU LIKE IT. YOUR COMMENTS SUSTAIN ME. Also, everyone give me your top Peterick song. It's important for, um, science.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise, there WILL be phone sex. Just... not yet. Thanks for reading, all!

Pete peels his face off Mikey’s chest groggily. Somewhere, a phone is ringing. He wipes drool off his chin and hopes he hasn’t been snoring into Mikey’s armpit. This has happened before, and he was teased for it. For weeks he was teased.

“Shut up,” Mikey mumbles in his sleep, rolling over and stuffing his head under a pillow to escape the phone. Pete slithers out of his tangled dirty sheets and fumbles his cell out of a knot of discarded clothes.

“H’lo?” he says. It is 3:10 in the morning, he barely qualifies as conscious, and Pete is in not in any way prepared for Patrick Stumph’s golden voice pouring out of the phone.

“Hi,” says Patrick shyly, one word enough to fling Pete’s heart across six counties. “Were you sleeping?”

“I am wide awake,” says Pete. It’s true: hearing Patrick’s voice is the rough equivalent of being electrocuted.

Patrick laughs, sounding pleased. “Me too.”

Pete is trying very hard not to look at the futon where Mikey is sleeping off their midnight debauchery, the futon where earlier _this evening_ a half-naked and criminally marvelous high schooler had lain. Pete feels absurdly guilty. The whole point of calling Mikey tonight, Pete reminds himself, was to get Patrick out of his system. To keep him from doing something stupid. To keep him from hurting Patrick and/or going to jail. Because, god, and he knows this now, Pete can _not_ control himself. It took all of his strength and willpower not to jump onto the train after Patrick, to attach himself with superglue to the most beautiful boy he’s ever seen. Pete had stayed at Union Station, waiting for the next train, for fully 48 minutes before he talked himself down from following Patrick to the suburbs, standing outside his bedroom window _Say Anything_ style, proclaiming his depraved and illegal love.

The whole situation is tragically unfair.

He has only just met Patrick, is the point. There is still a chance he can let him go—set him free before the damage is done. Pete has no conviction he can stay above the belt next time, with the way Patrick kept wriggling his hips and letting out groans of pleasure and want, with the way Patrick’s thin blue eyelids and golden lashes fluttered closed while Pete’s mouth was on his neck and then did it again, the exact same way, while his voice softly, softly picked out the words to sing along with his guitar.

Pete has never heard a voice like that, before. Patrick is a siren and the rocks Pete is going to be smashed on are colloquially known as _prison_.

Pete called Mikey because if he had to do something stupid (and he’s Pete, so he did), he’d rather do his ex than insinuate himself disastrously into this pure boy’s life. Pete called Mikey to blot out the fresh, delicious memories of Patrick; to erase them, so he can let Patrick go.

So now he has to let Patrick go.

“Listen, I don’t think I can see you anymore,” Pete forces himself to say at the very same moment Patrick says, “All I can think about is when I’ll get to see you again.”

They are so stupidly in sync, Pete wants to hang himself. Because seeing Patrick again is all Pete can think about, too; was all Pete could think about the whole time he was with Mikey; is all Pete will be able to think about for the rest of his life, probably, no matter how much ground he tries to put between them. If he doesn’t end it now before his infamously unsound resolve utterly crumbles, he does not know what he will do, and that should scare them both.

“What?” says Patrick.

Pete starts spinning words, spilling 3 a.m. nonsense, trying to build a wall of enough words that Patrick will be safe from him. He does not think too hard about what he’s saying. It’s a survival move, an escape-at-all-costs kind of thing. It has caused problems in the past.

“I am a shitty person to fall in love with,” Pete says. “And I know you’re not—no one is—but Patrick. When I look at you, I see so much _potential_ , all this possibility, streaming out of you like sunrise. You’re so golden, you’re blinding. The Sun King has nothing on you. There is not a damn thing in this universe I want more than—than— But the thing is, I don’t want anything to—I especially don’t want to be the thing to narrow your options, to change you before you change the world. I’ve never seen, or felt, or heard, anything like you, kid. I would fall in love with you in two heartbeats, but I will fuck you up in one.”

There is silence. It is terrible. Pete hopes the word-barricade will hold. Pete hopes literally anything will hold him back. He is shaking so hard, he won’t be able to hold anything. Anything except Patrick. When Pete closes his eyes, even for a second, what he sees is Patrick’s soft pale skin. Pete swears off blinking forever.

Finally, Patrick speaks. “This is an age thing, isn’t it.” His voice is dry, sarcastic. Pete wonders if he heard a word of it, if he’s able to. If someone said it to Pete—and he knows, _he knows already_ , no one ever would—well. It’s not like he’d hear it either.

Pete closes his eyes for a long moment to rally strength. He’s never been good at keeping vows. Instead of strength he finds Patrick’s eyes, Patrick’s smile, the rolling hills of Patrick’s denim-hugged ass. Patrick’s _illegal_ ass.

“I want you, I do,” Pete hears himself saying. This is off the script, against the rules, the opposite of what he’s supposed to be saying. “But you’re so young, a living promise. I just can’t. I—I don’t trust myself with you.”

“I do,” says Patrick. “ _I_ trust me with you. Isn’t that my decision?”

Is he an actual succubus, Pete wonders, or just an undercover cop? Because this is definitely entrapment. This is some shit Johnny Depp would do in the gay reboot of 21 Jump Street. (A show which, for the record, Pete would _absolutely_ watch.)

“I am a _stranger_ , Patrick! You don’t even know me. Didn’t they teach you about stranger danger in—in school?” Imagining Patrick at a high school desk is meant to be repellant, sobering, but Pete is a predatory monster and the image, like all images of Patrick he has been able to conjure, is alarmingly sexy.

“Would it change anything if I told you I turn seventeen in April?”

Pete is absolutely going to drown himself as soon as he gets off this call. “Would it change anything if I found out that you are CURRENTLY SIXTEEN YEARS OLD?” Mikey rolls over again, grumbling. Pete realizes he is getting loud. As with everything else, he cannot seem to stop himself. “I mean it probably changes the level of _hell_ I’m going to, if that’s what you mean!”

Perhaps realizing his mistake, Patrick says nothing. “You should’ve come with a warning label,” Pete mutters, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. He begins pacing back and forth through his tiny studio apartment, briefly illuminated as he crosses each pane of moonlight.

“Me!” All at once, Patrick is fucking done, apparently, because his whisper turns into a full-throated incredulity. Discovering Patrick has limits, Patrick will not submit to being pushed around, only makes Pete want him more. (Makes Pete think, maybe, that this kid can take care of himself—won’t let Pete ruin him. Will say no when it needs to be said. Maybe.) Pete has never fallen in love quite like this before. Pete does things like this: all the way, all at once, hopelessly and without hope of drawing breath. But this is different. It’s like he’s been all in since before he met Patrick, since before he knew Patrick even existed. It’s like he was _made_ for loving this kid. This young, stubborn, irresistible, super jailbait kid.

Pete is so fucking screwed.

“Listen, you’re the one who started this, Mr. Poster Boy for Stranger Danger. _You’re_ the one who said you didn’t want to know my age, who took me into an alley and kissed me, who begged me to come to the city and brought me back to your apartment, who—who looked at me like I was something you were about to eat! Where are _your_ eyes and smile and stupid tattoos on this warning label registry? I mean, does the attorney general even fucking _know_ about the risk you pose to my health?”

Patrick breathes hard into the phone. Pete is paralyzed electric by the sound.

“Doesn’t it matter what I want, too?” Patrick says, softer now. Pete is weak in the knees, groin, and heart. “Don’t I get a say in this?”

“Would it change anything if I told you you might not be safe with me? That when I’m with you, I can’t control myself? That I don’t know what I’ll do?” Pete’s basically begging, now. This is his last hope for mercy, for someone else’s restraint. He’s never had much of his own.

“I mean,” answers Patrick, and Pete can hear his unfairly sexy smile even through the phone, “it might change what level of hell I’m going to.”

And Pete is lost.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Garbage delivery! Your kindness, friendship, and support is bowling me over in a continual way.

Wary of his little sister’s machinations, this time Patrick gets permission from his parents. Not to have degrees of sexual relations with a 22-year-old of the same gender, but to go into the city to see a show. Which is not a lie, because while Patrick is _definitely_ seeing Pete’s band play, he’s totally flexible on what happens afterwards. It might not even approach sexual relations! (He’s got high hopes, though. He’s had a hard-on for what seems like three days straight.)

The lie part is when he asks if he can spend the night at Joe’s afterwards. Patrick has no intention of spending the night at Joe’s. Patrick Stumph, sex adventurer, plans to go wherever Pete Wentz takes him.

Patrick passes Joe a note in fourth period Comparative Religion. It reads:

_Can you cover for me this weekend? Told my mom I was crashing @ your house_

Joe’s eyebrows are floating off his forehead with intrigue. He writes back:

_where are you crashing instead?_

Patrick wishes to avoid this question.

_A true bro would not ask_ ,

he writes.

Joe rolls his eyes so hard it looks dangerous and makes a big show of crumpling this note into a ball, getting up, walking across the classroom, and energetically throwing it away. Both Patrick and Mr. Datik, the religion teacher, glare mightily.

Patrick pens a fresh note.

_I’m going to a show in Cicero. Pleeeeeease? I’ll be your best friend_

He gets back:

_A true best friend would invite me to the show_

This scenario is not at the _top_ of the very long list of Things Patrick Is Currently Trying To Avoid, but it’s on there. He doesn’t know what could happen with Pete, what he even wants to happen, but isn’t that kind of the point? He wants to protect that ambiguity, that—how had Pete said it?—sunrise of possibilities. He wants a night that can go anywhere. Joe is a harsh limiting factor on that sexy equation, and furthermore screw Joe for making him think about calculus when he wants to be thinking about penises.

Patrick also has the hard-to-define sense that Pete’s grudging invitation to this show is a chance in a short line of chances. He feels like he needs to convince Pete, somehow, to keep letting him come, to let him… _come_. To keep taking his hand, grinning a wild stupid grin at him, kissing him like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. Patrick is a liability to Pete, he knows it. He wants to… to prove he’s worth the risk. Patrick also knows he’s young, less experienced and less exciting, less free and less mature than the other people in Pete’s possible make-out partner pool. He very much wants to keep Pete out of that pool. In spite of himself, in spite of everything his mother ever taught him, Patrick wants to convince Pete-the-way-too-old-for-him-stranger that he’s worth keeping.

Scarier than lying or sneaking out or Pete himself (none of which Patrick is very good at) is this: Patrick’s own enormous, impossible, self-destructive desire to be kept.

Spooked by the ominous rumblings of his own heart, Patrick scribbles:

_Of course you’re invited to the show! Did you not get your invitation? It was illuminated by monks and sealed with gold leaf. I mailed it like 2 days ago. No Christmas bonus for the liveried messenger this year, I guess_

Joe scratches the bridge of his nose with his middle finger, sticking his tongue out at Patrick. Datik turns around at the exact wrong moment and Joe is obligated to pretend he is engaged in a large, theatrical sneeze.

Patrick decides he’ll be glad to have Joe with him. After all, it will take one train and two buses to get to the show in Cicero, and Patrick won’t mind the company. As long as Joe gets right back _on_ those two buses and one train after the show, that is. Patrick is not interested in finding out whether Pete’s futon has room for three—not when he’s still trying, with the stupid determination of a moth battering itself to death against a porch light, to convince Pete it’s got room for two.

 

 

They get to the show during soundcheck. About fifteen other kids mill about in the warehouse. It looks like it’s a gym during business hours—punching bags and dummies line the far wall, their outlines portentous in the low light. Part of the floor is covered in wrestling mats. The band is setting up on the concrete, the mats behind them. This is a shame: wrestling mats might be a nice place to mosh. Less risk of trampling, maybe. It’s not like Pete can rescue him this time. The huge bay door at the back of the building is open, giving it the illusion of being the front; they step in and stare all the way through the uninterrupted hollow rectangle of the warehouse, looking out the glass front like it’s just a window. In twos and threes, kids wander in from somewhere out in the industrial park. It is definitely the kind of place murderers hang out.

Patrick, playing it cool, does not run up to the stage and gush, “Hi, Pete!” with Tex Avery hearts in his eyes. He lingers by the doors, trying to avoid explaining to Joe how he found out about the show.

“My friend Pete is in the band,” he’s saying, which is definitely _part_ of the true story of how they ended up here tonight.

“Your what what? Patrick, you don’t have any friends I don’t know.” Joe is giving him suspicious looks that he does not appreciate. Suspicion makes sense, maybe: Joe did wrangle the invitation to this show via Patrick trying to use him to lie about his whereabouts, and none of this behavior—starting with not inviting Joe to the show in the first place—is exactly characteristic. The sneakiest thing Patrick’s ever done in his life, before Pete, is eat an entire box of Girl Scout cookies while he was home alone even though he _knew_ the Thin Mints were for Kevin.

Anyway, he finds he’s glad he’s not alone; hovering aloofly by this huge delivery door would look less grown-up and disaffected and cool, more sad and isolated if he was alone.

“I might!” Patrick insists crabbily. He is crabby because the group that drifted in after them is made up entirely of girls in tall boots and short skirts, and they have rushed to the stage gushing, “Hi, Pete!”, and Pete is talking to them, smiling his goofy smile, pushing his bangs out of his eyes over and over. The girls keep giggling. Pete looks like he’s enjoying himself. Patrick feels like he’s swallowed an anthill. If he makes it through the night without vomiting on anyone out of pure, unadulterated insane jealousy, it will be a victory for all mankind.

Pete has not even noticed him. (This is obviously totally unrelated to how Patrick is skulking in the shadows in the back.) Suddenly, Patrick regrets coming. He is sixteen years old. What does he possibly think is going to happen? How could this possibly end? Pete doesn’t want him here. Pete doesn’t want to be with a kid. That’s what he was too nice to say, what he wanted to say on the phone. Most of all Patrick regrets wearing Pete’s stupid hat. He glowers beneath its brim.

“You’re staring, Patty,” Joe says unhelpfully. “Is that the guy? Where did you meet him? He’s got tattoos. He’s wearing _eyeliner_.”

“At a show, obviously. Everything that happens happens at shows.” Patrick’s tone is still snappish, but Joe relaxes into the logic. Joe understands about shows. It’s why he’s Patrick’s closet friend. “Do I—do I look okay?”

Joe could tease him for this—would be fully within his best friend rights to mock the shit out of Patrick for the next three years about this. But Patrick can tell in one look that Joe, too, is feeling very high school and out of place in this crowd. Some are clearly older; most are better dressed; _all_ are plainly cooler by several orders of magnitude. Next time there will probably be a bouncer at Pete’s band’s show, to keep the rabble like Patrick and Joe out. The worst part is that, shining at the center of it all, is Pete: his quick smile, his unguarded eyes, a tight polo shirt with a stupid popped collar, ripped black jeans, pointed teeth that make every twitch of his carmine lips suggestive—Pete, fucking Pete. He has a nod and a word for everyone, the corner of his mouth hitched up in amusement, and Patrick wants to collect his. The guitar player keeps leaning on Pete’s shoulder, throwing an arm around him, touching him with a familiarity Patrick longs for. Patrick does not like any of this—the proof that, of course, he is not the only person in Pete’s life, the only person he’s kissed, the only person he’s ever laid claim to, the only person who’s ever been swept away by how painfully extraordinary everything about Pete is. At the same time, for one smile and one word, Patrick would subject himself to any unpleasantness or degradation. Hell, he’d hurl himself into the sun, if it would make Pete smile for six seconds.

“Yeah, man,” Joe says. He sounds sincere. Joe has always been a good friend. “It’s a cool hat.”

Patrick tugs said hat down lower on his head and takes a deep breath, psyching himself up for the approach. It was easier when it was just the two of them. It was easier before Pete tried to get him to stay away, as if that had been an option for even a second after their hurricane of a first kiss. (Hurricane sounds—unpleasant. But the earth moved and the skies opened up and everything was burning, so Patrick feels confident the kiss was some kind of natural disaster.) Pete had not just left hickeys on Patrick’s neck, he’d left them on Patrick’s _soul_. This is not a pick-up line Patrick is planning to use in the future. He is hoping to forget it, really.

Before he can ask himself if it’s a good idea—his signature move, lately—Patrick launches himself across the room, into the gravitational field of Pete, Pete’s celestial body. (Patrick winces inwardly. Even in his thoughts, he has no game.)

Patrick barely has time to work up a nervous sweat before he’s there. He prepares himself to be crushed—to be just one more adoring face in a crowd of adoring faces. God, he will die if Pete doesn’t recognize him. He is so, so glad Joe is here to go home with. What was he thinking? Pete won’t want to hang out with him in front of his friends. Patrick is for alleyways and dark apartments only. Pete won’t want some dumb kid following him home tonight.

“Uh, hey,” says Patrick, a super suave opening line. (Soooo much better than a lot of the material his inner monologue’s been churning up, though.) In the millisecond it takes for Pete’s eyes to lift to his, he dies three hundred and seventy-two deaths.

“You came!” Pete’s whole face lights up with exuberant recognition. It is the facial equivalent of being presented with a basketful of puppies. Pete drops his bass so it hangs from its strap and clasps one hand to each of Patrick’s shoulders. Patrick is floating. He’s been watching, and Pete hasn’t touched anyone else. “Nice hat,” Pete says, grinning. Neither of them can tear their eyes away.

Because he has no chill, literally no chill at all, Patrick stares into Pete’s beautiful eyes and blurts out helplessly, “I don’t have anywhere to be tonight. Um, after you play.”

Pete is visibly jolted by this information. “All night tonight? Or til 8:30 tonight?” There is a rawness in Pete’s voice, a hunger in his eyes that undercuts the teasing words. He’s not smiling now.

“All night tonight,” Patrick manages. His own voice is sounding pretty hoarse. Personally, he feels he deserves credit for being able to speak at all while Pete is touching him, while Pete’s hands are on him, in front of all these people. “I mean, if you want me.” Patrick almost chokes on the words. He’s not sure what he’s saying, what he’s offering. He’s not sure whether he’s alarmed or aroused or both. Probably both. With Pete it’s usually both.

Pete has not breathed, Patrick thinks, for slightly too long. He looks a little cross-eyed.

They are both saved from Pete’s answer by one of Pete’s bandmates. The drummer walks over, scratching the back of his neck. “Amps about ready?” he asks.

With great effort, and frequent dazed glances back, Pete directs his gaze away from Patrick and towards the drummer. He finds his smile again, coming back from the (hopefully) debauched place Patrick’s thoughts had also been.

“Dan, this is Patrick,” Pete provides the introduction with his puppy grin. Patrick hadn’t noticed Pete introducing anyone else to his bandmates. Louder, he calls, “Guys! Look! This is my Patrick!”

_My Patrick_. It doesn’t even matter what happens tonight. Patrick Stumph can officially die happy.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't stop, won't stop. Guys. Send help.

Somehow—and Pete’s not entirely sure how he got himself into this particular situation—there are not one but _two_ sixteen year olds sleeping in his apartment right now. Pete is pretty sure this is some kind of sting operation and the feds are gonna bust into his shitty studio and arrest him any second. His imagination is really running away with what he’s started calling ‘the 21 Jump Street protocols.’ Patrick and Joe both denied these allegations, but of course they would.

“You have to tell me you’re a cop,” Pete had insisted, “if you’re a cop.”

“Do you _want_ us to be cops? It seems like he wants us to be cops,” said Joe, who does not know Pete at _all_ and must think he’s a crazy person, which Pete also thinks about himself sometimes, so astute character insight, Joe.

“I could be a cop,” Patrick said significantly. There was an eyebrow motion involved. Pete’s eyes had caught on those ludicrously pink lips for a moment too long. “Gross, guys. Stop flirting,” said Joe. Pete’s face was a forest fire.

So now Joe, who missed his second bus but not his first, obligating Pete and Patrick to turn around and go get him like one _minute_ after they’d stepped into Pete’s apartment and before Pete could so much as kiss this damn kid—now Joe is bedded down in a pile of laundry and pillows and Patrick is sprawled in front of the bathroom door with his head on a folded towel and his shirt is riding up, revealing the barest inch of skin, and Pete’s no psychologist but he feels qualified to say that if he doesn’t get to touch Patrick soon he _will_ actually stab his eyes out with the sharpened end of his own toothbrush and bleed to death, except _oh wait he can’t because there’s Patrick’s tummy skin blocking the bathroom doorway._

There is no way Pete will ever sleep again. He finds himself standing over Patrick. This feels creepy, so he crouches. (Not much better.) “Patrick,” he whispers. “Hey, Patrick. Are you awake?”

Patrick obviously is not. He snores softly, looking peaceful. This is not the wanton night of sexual delights Patrick had alluded to. Apparently it’s not even a wanton night of staying awake past one a.m. Pete hesitates a moment, thinks to himself, _what the hell, it’s not like he’s got school in the morning_ , and shoves Patrick’s shoulder.

“Patrick!” he hisses again. “C’mon, this is weird and I don’t want to be alone.” He tries shoving Patrick’s other shoulder. Patrick drags an armful of Pete’s t-shirts (he really doesn’t have that much bedding) up to his chest and snuggles into it, rolling onto his side.

Pete has at least fifteen other ideas for how to wake Patrick up, but at least fourteen of them are illegal and Joe’s _right there_ , so instead Pete lies down on the floor next to Patrick. He wiggles closer until he’s curved around Patrick’s back. He lays his head on a knot of his own rumpled skinny jeans and watches his breath ruffle the fine golden hairs on the back of Patrick’s neck. Carefully, Pete slips one hand over Patrick’s ribs, where he can feel the working of Patrick’s heart and lungs. It’s more comfortable than you’d think—definitely an improvement over the futon mattress.

Pete is asleep in no time.

 

 

Breakfast is a whole other ordeal. Once again, like the trash can he is, Pete has nothing suitable in the house to offer. (Two freezer-burnt Eggo waffles, a packet of broken pop tarts, and an unopened box of flavorless bran cereal from his mom that no one is ever going to eat.) It is possible he is not a very good host. Then again, these are not exactly invited guests. Anyway, they go out.

Across a sticky tabletop, Joe eyes Pete with renewed suspicion. Joe woke up first, to the sight of an empty futon and Pete and Patrick unconscious on the floor, Pete contorted on his back with Patrick’s head on his chest, Patrick’s arm thrown across him, Pete’s own arm long numb and trapped under Patrick, Pete the happiest he’s ever been in his whole damn life, probably.

Pete woke second, cheeks aching like he’s been grinning all night in his sleep, to Joe saying disapprovingly, “I’d have taken the mattress if I’d know you dudes were gonna _snuggle_ all night.”

Patrick woke third, smiling contentedly like he’d just logged the best eight hours of his life, hair sticking up so ridiculously Pete had to wrestle down two hundred separate urges to tackle him back into the laundry nest and muss him even more, morning breath be damned.

Joe watched all this, unimpressed. His mistrust of Pete only grew when it transpired that Pete had been out of coffee for the last six weeks and had not quite managed, yet, to buy any more. (Pete is admittedly not the best at groceries.)

“What school did you say you went to?” Joe asks over the chipped ceramic brim of his coffee cup. Pete finds his manner menacing. To buy time, Pete takes a way-too-mouth-burningly-large gulp of his own coffee. He did not plan on meeting Joe. He does not have an alibi. He wishes he had the forethought to introduce himself with a fake name. _Jordan Rodman_ , he thinks. A perfect alias. Sounds exactly like a real thing a human would be named.

“Um, what school did Patrick say I went to?” Pete deflects the question badly. Patrick looks up from the frankly overwhelming pancake menu just in time to look alarmed.

“Oh, uh… Pete dropped out of high school to pursue his music.” Pete kicks Patrick under the table. Could he have come up with a less cool lie? _Pete dropped out of high school because he was recruited to be a point guard for the freaking NBA_ , how about. _Pete graduated high school a year early and was named valedictorian for all time because he’s basically a genius. Pete graduated from Harvard, yes Harvard, at 15, pioneered a revolutionary new space shuttle design that NASA is_ still _using, and won an Olympic gold medal for javelin throwing, and now that he’s got all that under his belt, recently he’s pursuing a shitty rock band and slumming it for a while. Deliberately. He’s got loads of money, if he wants it, from his time as an international celebrity. He could totally buy groceries if he wanted to. He definitely does not work an embarrassing part-time job with a uniform. He absolutely has a high school diploma_. There are literally SO MANY lies Patrick could have opted for that don’t make Pete sound like a total loser. Pete decides he’s in charge of writing his own cover stories from now on. It’s his bad, really, for bouncing this one to Patrick.

Pete _did_ finish high school, thank you very much, four years ago, for all the good it’s done him, is the point. Four years ago… when Patrick was twelve.

Pete takes another catastrophically huge mouthful of scalding coffee, hoping it will burn out the sudden nausea.

“A real go-getter, then,” says Joe. Pete does not understand how anyone can be so aggressive on an empty stomach. Also he’s pretty sure Joe hasn’t exactly won any Nobel prizes, so maybe he can back the fuck off until they’ve eaten, at least.

“Joe! What the hell, man?” protests Patrick. The pancake menu is now utterly forgotten. “Pete let us crash at his place! We have to be, like, at least a little nice to him.”

“Oh, is that what you were doing all night?” Joe asks sarcastically. He is—yes, he is _definitely_ glaring at Pete now. He’s not even pretending not to. It’s possible they are approaching the root of his evident problem with Pete. It’s possible Joe is made uncomfortable by dude-on-dude snuggling, and this is something they’re going to have to deal with, right here, right now, in the middle of Cafeteria Marcelas. Pete hopes it doesn’t cause a scene. He loves the pancakes here and would like to be invited back.

Before Patrick can respond to Joe’s latest jab, Joe has turned on Pete, Joe is asking the question that has haunted Pete every moment of the last week, that has plagued Pete’s every waking _second_ since he found out Patrick was still in high school, and not in the 18 year old kind of way. Joe glares directly into Pete’s guilty face and demands, “How old _are_ you, even?”

At that precise inopportune moment, their waitress returns to the table for their orders. Pete’s first thought is _shit, another witness. I haven’t even decided how to get rid of the first one yet._ His second thought, the way less murdery one, which is luckily the one he says out loud, is, “Lemon-blueberry pancakes for me. And bacon. Oh, and definitely hash browns. And—sorry—do you have juice?”

Pete orders grapefruit juice (oh and also scrambled eggs, please) and Patrick places his order and by the time it gets to Joe he’s still glaring at Pete with maximum ominousity, but really has no choice but to turn to the waitress and order as well, because otherwise it’d be pretty rude. Joe is actually markedly polite to the waitress, Pete notes, which really serves to highlight what a dick he’s being to Pete.

“He’s eighteen,” Patrick says too loudly, as the waitress walks away. Seeing the dubious look on Joe’s face, Patrick quickly corrects, “Nineteen. I mean nineteen.”

“If I were any older than that I’d definitely have a better apartment,” Pete adds convincingly, “and have figured out how to make grocery lists.”

“Well I think you’re a little old for Patrick,” Joe shoots back. Pete begins to appreciate that he was worried about all the wrong things, before. New worries flood in. Such as, Joe could be something worse than an undercover cop. He could be a loving and concerned friend who will threaten Pete into never seeing Patrick again, which Pete already knows he will fail at, it’s already impossible, and who will then tell Patrick’s parents, who will then certainly call the _actual_ police and probably the child sexual abuse hotline. This is not necessarily the _absolute_ worst case scenario, but it ranks somewhere between Jurassic Chicago: Velociraptors Take Over The City, Feasting Upon The Populace and Instituting Shitty Civil Policies and Meteor Destroys Earth; Everyone Is Super Dead.

Feeling backed into a corner, Pete does what he does best: makes shit worse. “What, like I’d date a high school guy? How pathetic do you think I am? I know, like, ten different people past the age of consent who’d go on a date with me right _now_. I had a date with a 21 year-old last _week_. Anyway I wasn’t aware I needed, like, a permission slip to hang out with Patrick? Are you like his _dad_ , or just his super aggressive babysitter?”

Two flushed, angry faces stare back at Pete. The far side of the table is officially united against him. He fears he has made a fatal tactical error. The problem with being Pete, though, is that so many fucking _words_ are coming out of his mouth at any given moment that he can never fucking tell which ones caused the offense. This makes it significantly harder to apologize. Of the ten people who would go on a date with him right now, there’s probably not even one who would agree to a second date. No one ever wants to stay for long. Pete doesn’t blame them.

“You had a date last week?” Patrick echoes. His face is crestfallen. Pete hopes he’s imagining the wet shine to Patrick’s eyes. _Be angry instead,_ Pete wishes as hard as he can. _Just hate me, don’t be hurt. Don’t let me have hurt you already. I’m an asshole, everyone knows I’m an asshole, please just hate me, please get mad._

Pete doesn’t even know how to answer. Technically no, he did _not_ have a date last week, but he _did_ fuck Mikey like less than two hours after Patrick, shirtless and shining, was whimpering underneath him on his futon. Is that better or worse?

“Why are you hanging out with us at all, then, if you’re so much cooler than we are?” Joe’s whole face is turning red. It was a mistake, saying something that sounded like an insult to Patrick in front of this guy. Even as Joe tears into him, Pete is perversely glad Patrick has him. Everyone should have someone who loves them enough to defend them—from creeps taking advantage (like Pete) and assholes talking shit (like Pete) and whatever other threats are out there (probably also Pete).

“I mean, technically I didn’t ask to hang out with you guys,” some asshole says in a voice that sounds a lot like Pete’s. Stupid, stupid Pete. This is why he will die alone. To protect the human race from his entire personality of bullshit. Joe looks apoplectic.

Pete doesn’t have many friends right now who aren’t sick of him. He’s a lot to deal with. He understands. Still, at this particular moment he thinks it’d be nice to have someone like Joe, someone who’d stick up for him in a fight and help him put himself back together. Mostly it’s just… Pete. Mostly he doesn’t bother.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Pete says, full remorse of his face. He can’t look at them. Everything in him is screaming he should run, get out, do the easy thing, forget it. But Patrick Stumph might be the first thing in his whole life he doesn’t feel like running from. Pete stands his ground. Pete says, “I’m sorry. One thing you’ll figure out pretty quick, if you hang around, is I’m an asshole.”

“It’s—it’s actually really hard to yell at him when he closes down and blames himself like that,” Joe says to Patrick. “Like, I’d like to berate him some more for being a dick, but he looks like he feels so bad already.”

Pete, hopeful, looks up through his bangs at the exact perfect moment to see Patrick wipe his pink cheeks with the back of his hand, crumple his napkin on the table, and say, “I think I could probably yell.” Patrick leaves the table, mumbling over his shoulder in a manner plainly directed at Joe and only Joe, “Bathroom.”

Pete considers following him, honestly, just to get out of this moment with Joe, which is sure to be awkward. Pete is a Houdini of awkward moments. He creates them and then escapes them, or drowns in a straightjacket trying. But he doesn’t know what he’d say to Patrick, either. There’s no trick knot or handcuff key for this one.

“So uh,” Pete says conversationally, “I really fucked that up, huh.”

“Spectacularly,” Joe agrees, raising his coffee in a mock-toast. Here they are getting along and Patrick’s not even there to see it. Pete being an asshole is, evidently, a topic they can agree on.

“I really like him,” Pete blurts out. Apparently it’s confessional hour in shitty diners nationwide, and no one’s stopping Pete Wentz, especially not Pete Wentz. “Like—too much, probably.”

“And you were a dick to him just now because…?”

“Same reason you’ve been a dick to me since you met me, probably,” Pete shoots back. “I’m worried I’m too old for him. That just by being near him I’m taking advantage. That I won’t know what I’m doing isn’t okay and he won’t stop me.”

To Joe’s enormous credit, he chews on that a minute. Pete should bring life’s quandaries to sixteen year-olds more often. They are unexpectedly respectful.

“Have you said any of that to him?” Joe asks fairly. “Because, like, I’m also sixteen? So I don’t know what you want me to say. You seem creepy to me, but I believe you. That you like him. He likes you too.”

Pete appreciates Joe’s candor; he really does. He wonders, though—if he does talk to Patrick about this, if Patrick lets him that close again—as the adult here, isn’t it Pete’s paternalistic duty to not take Patrick seriously? To assume he can’t really know what he wants, what he’s asking?

But if Pete believed that, and was here anyway—if Pete believed that and spent the night smelling Patrick’s shampoo and lightly petting his back anyway—he really _would_ be a creepy opportunistic pervert. Pete didn’t know either, really, what he wanted or what he was asking for. This is not surprising. Pete Wentz has never mastered the _informed_ part. _Consent_ will have to be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: finally, the underage smut you've been promised. #scumbaron


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Give us this day our daily trash.
> 
> I love you guys. Thank you so much. I have been listening to some really solid 2006 jams while writing this, but also, [ here's an upsettingly erotic playlist of Patrick Stump singing acoustic songs](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ3rM7EohEVnNBzSwJgxYajXLkbwmAPXk) for your viewing/listening pleasure! The advent of this playlist has improved not just this fic but my whole life. *sage nod*

Patrick is coming down, a little—recognizing that he really has no official claim to Pete (WE MADE OUT TWICE, WE’RE MARRIED NOW) and he’s not sure exactly what they’ve shared or even if it makes sense to be so hurt, given that Pete is a literally a stranger he followed into an alley one time—when Pete looks up at him guiltily and says, “Fuck, I’m so sorry, I think I forgot my wallet.”

So Patrick pays for Pete’s unfathomably enormous breakfast, eyes rolling out of his skull and full flame annoyance kicking back on, because after all isn’t one of the perks of dating an older man supposed to be that he buys things for you, not that Patrick has noticed any perks _so far_ , not that Pete has ever even acted like an older man so much as a _feral child_ , so far it’s been all lying and sneaking around and shows and glorious, glorious kissing the most astoundingly gorgeous human being he’s ever—

Patrick has lost the thread of his annoyance. Pete is blazing a grin at him, saying, “Thanks, ‘Trick, I’ll get you next time,” like Patrick has even agreed to a next time. Still, he’s flattered that Pete wants there to be. Even if high schoolers _are_ too pathetic to date.

Pete walks them to the bus stop they need and gives them excessively detailed instructions about which stop to get off at to transfer to the commuter train. Patrick tries his hardest not to find this endearing. Then, as their bus is pulling up, Pete tugs Patrick’s hand hard enough to topple Patrick into his chest. He kisses Patrick’s cheek in such a way that his whole face presses against it and his lips are hot against Patrick’s ear and he says low, “I won’t go on any more dates, if you don’t want me to.”

Pete stuffs a bundle of fabric into Patrick’s hand and pushes him towards the bus after Joe. It’s not til the bus is pulling away that Patrick unfolds it and sees it’s the Metallica t-shirt Pete had been wearing all morning. Patrick has no idea when Pete managed to take it off. It’s still warm. It smells—Patrick sniffs as covertly as possible but Joe totally sees—like Pete’s deodorant and sweat. This is the most erotic combination known to Patrick Stumph and maybe all of mankind.

It’s pretty hard to stay mad after that.

 

 

“God, I wish you were here,” groans Pete over the phone.

“What would you do to me if I was?” Patrick is a little breathless. All the nourishing oxygen-rich blood in his body is headed directly to his crotch, making it hard to breathe. It must be the madness of hypoxia empowering him to speak so boldly—to say out loud things he’d be too embarrassed to even write down in private on a burning piece of paper. Pete gives him altitude sickness. Pete makes him drunk.

“Before or after I’m hauled away in handcuffs?” Even over the phone, Patrick is learning, Pete gets a little stuck on the whole ‘arrested as a sex criminal’ thing. Patrick thinks it’s so he can feel like a marginally better human while he continues doing all the wicked, seedy shit he’s verbally repentant about anyway.

“Do you want handcuffs? We can talk about handcuffs. I’m so hard, Pete,” says Patrick, like a harlot. Getting the words out of his mouth is like flinging himself off the high dive. His whole body is goosebumps, his stomach is clenched in that rollercoaster free-fall feeling, he can feel his heartbeat in his lips. He can’t entirely see straight. Thinking is right out. He understands the thrill behind illicit sex now. He _totally gets it._ The sex-crazed brain parasite that has taken over his vocal cords says, “If _you_ aren’t going to get me off—”

“Oh my _god_ , Patrick,” Pete moans. “Okay. Okay. If you were here right now, and you had signed a legally sound document indicating consent, I’d… I’d push you down, wherever you were standing. I’d put my mouth on your neck and kiss you to the ground. I’d pin your wrists down. I’d kiss you. God, I’d kiss you like your lungs held the last molecule of air in the universe, like you were the last breath of air in our galaxy. I’d kiss you like I was dying and only you could save me, like kissing you was the only worthwhile thing to do with my last moment on earth, like we were on a beach while a meteor came down over the ocean to obliterate all life—”

Patrick would laugh, if he could breathe. He’s picturing Pete Wentz, speaking in poems while he strokes his own dick, like he just can’t help but to rhapsodize, like every sweaty syllable off his tongue is part of a sonnet. Patrick has never liked anyone as much in his _life_ as he likes Pete Wentz, too-much-feeling, too-little-filter Pete Wentz.

“Then what?” Patrick asks, eyes closed, smiling. He’s in his bedroom with the handset. His door is locked and barricaded with his desk chair. He was not lying about how hard he is. He traces outlines on his belly, around his nipples, wets his fingers in his mouth and does it again. He’s trying not to touch himself til Pete says he would. He’s trying to imagine it’s Pete’s hand, not his own.

Pete makes an urgent, frustrated noise that isn’t quite human, that originates somewhere lower in the evolutionary chain. “Your shirt definitely has to go,” says Pete. Alone in his bedroom, Patrick wriggles out of his shirt. (Pete’s shirt, really—Patrick has worn it every night since Pete gave it to him. He plans never to wash it.) “So I’d take that off, and I’d…”

“What? You’d what?” Patrick isn’t faking the breathy desperation, either. “Uhnnnn, Pete, please!” That wasn’t faked either. This man is driving him _crazy_. If _someone_ doesn’t put hands on him soon—

Pete’s words come out in a rush, a confession. “I’d lick your chest. I’d bite your nipples—not hard, just… just so you jumped. I’d cover every inch of your skin with my hands, I’d feel all of you—”

“Would you take off my pants already, though? Pete I am _begging_ you.” Patrick is panting. It is not dignified. He doesn’t care. He’ll be uncontrollably humping his own carpet soon; he doesn’t need dignity right now. Dignity does not even appear on the agonizingly lengthy menu of what he needs right now.

“Patrick, no,” Pete protests. Patrick hadn’t been aware the legal-above-the-waist rule applied to verbal co-op fantasies. Now that it has been brought to his awareness, Patrick thinks it’s bullshit.

“Please, just over the phone.” Patrick _is_ begging. His boner is very serious, possibly life-threatening. This is what _need_ feels like. Pete is silent, but you can just hear how tortured he is. Patrick decides to change the rules.

“Okay, I’m undoing my pants now,” he tells Pete, narrating as he does it. “God, my dick is so big right now, Pete—”

“ _Patrick_ , don’t _tell_ me that,” Pete protests. His voice is half scandal, half moan.

“I’m taking it in my hand. I’m touching myself, I’m thinking about you—”

“Patrick,” Pete says again. It is sounding less and less like a protest. Patrick’s name in that man’s mouth is erotic, emboldening. Patrick will say absolutely anything over the phone right now if it will make Pete say his name like that again.

“Tell me what you’re doing,” Patrick prompts. He likes this—being a phone sex coach. It makes him feel daring, experienced, a match for suddenly reluctant Pete. Who’s blushingly virginal now? Probably the guy who won’t even say _cock_ over the phone. Patrick would say _cock_ in _church_ right now, if that was what it took.

“I was in the shower when you called,” says Pete. “I was thinking about you. I was already halfway there. Now I’m… I’m naked, I’m wet, I’m shaking like I have hypothermia. God, I’m thinking about all the things I’m not allowed to do to you, I’m thinking about you thinking about me, I’m thinking about how much I’d like to be wet and naked with you—”

Patrick makes a sound that’s not words, just want and urgency and _Pete_. “I’m going to come,” Patrick whimpers. “I’m going to—”

“Oh my god!” someone exclaims. Some _third person_. Some _third person who sounds like Patrick’s mom_. “Patrick Stumph, hang up this phone right now!” Holy shit, it’s definitely Patrick’s mom _._

“Oh, fuck,” he hears Pete say. Patrick hopes to god Pete has enough sense to end the call, change his name, and move three states over, because Patrick is not staying on the line to relay these instructions. Patrick hangs up immediately and starts scrambling back into his clothes. He will probably never be able to get a boner again, as a result of the EXTREMELY AVERSIVE unconditioned stimuli of _his mom_ picking up the _phone_.

He barely has his—Pete’s—shirt on when his mom starts pounding on his bedroom door. She sounds hysterical. “Open this door, Patrick, and explain to me what the hell exactly you were just doing!”

 

 

Now that the shouting is over, Patrick is sitting on his bed with his head in his hands, too embarrassed to make eye contact with anyone ever again.

“It’s important that we be able to talk about this stuff, honey,” his mom says. She is sitting beside him on his bed, which is entirely too close. Inappropriately close. In the neighbor’s backyard she’s still be too close. Anywhere on this planet, really, is too close. Patrick would be much more comfortable if they could have this conversation while his mom was on Mercury. If that’s too much trouble, it would be _fine with him_ to not have it at all.

“I would like very much to die now,” says Patrick to his knees. He can’t see them because he has pants on, THANK GOD, but he’s sure they’re blushing too.

“I know it’s hard to think of me this way, but I’m a sexual being too,” says the creature of living nightmares impersonating Patrick’s mother. (He cannot survive in a world where his _real_ mother sits on his bed and says things like that. This is obviously some kind of malevolent shapeshifter. The presence of malevolent shapeshifts in his bedroom is the only comfort left to Patrick, that’s how bad things have gotten.)

“I said I was sorry a hundred and three times, can we be done now? Can this please be over?” Patrick is begging in a very different way than he was earlier.

“I remember being sixteen. It was an intense and exciting time. But there are some things I just don’t want you doing, at sixteen, in my house, Patrick, and phone sex is one of those things. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable.” She’s still talking. Somehow the shapeshifter is _still talking_. “Imagine if your sister had picked up the phone!” Hard pass on that. Patrick’s world is filled with enough horrors. “Sometimes I think technology lets you kids grow up too fast.” Seriously, when will she leave him to die in peace? He cannot cope with a nostalgic flashback to Little House on the Prairie right now.

“I _guarantee_ that after this experience it will _never_ happen again,” Patrick interrupts scathingly. “Please leave me to die of embarrassment now, Mom!”

He has made the mistake of looking up. He’s caught in her eye contact tractor beam now. “ _When_ you are ready to start having sex, which I am telling you is not now, I hope you’ll feel comfortable coming to me to help make it safe. Especially if… well… that was a boy’s voice I heard on the phone, dear, wasn’t it? It sounded like your new friend Pete?”

Patrick dives under his pillow. Maybe he can smother himself out of this conversation. It’s clearly not ending by any means but death.

“Well I’d especially like to meet him now, as you can imagine! But Patrick… I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Does this mean you’re… homosexual?”

“MOM!” Patrick shouts, emerging from under the pillow just enough to glare outrage at her. “I don’t know, okay? Maybe! Bisexual people exist! I guess I’m into dudes though! Like, confirmed! _Can we please stop talking now?!_ ”

“I can see you don’t feel comfortable discussing this right now,” says the astutely observant sex-positive shapeshifter. There are many sarcastic things Patrick would like to say, but nothing is worse the risk of extending this conversation. “Which I admit makes me a little sad. We’ll put a pin in it for now, dear. But Patrick?”

“ _What_.”

“I absolutely do not want any more phone sex going on under my roof. Okay? I forbid it. Enjoy your childhood while you still have some, honey. There’s no need to grow up all at once.”

She pats his leg—Patrick will have to cut it off and burn it now—and finally, mercifully, _at last_ leaves. She does _not_ close the door behind her, he notes. Revisiting the policy against locked doors was included in the yelling portion of this deeply traumatic evening; Patrick hopes closed doors aren’t outlawed, too.

Because obviously he’s going to have to do this again. Wet, naked Pete, hard and thinking of him? Oh yeah. It’s going to take all of his willpower, embarrassment, and basic human obedience just to stop himself from calling back _tonight_.


	9. Chapter 9

Pete is pretty much preparing himself for the gallows when his phone vibrates. It is Thursday afternoon and he has masturbated _four times_ thinking about what Patrick said, did on the phone last night, even with the catastrophic parental interruption that may have ended both Patrick’s life and their whatever-is-even-happening-ship. He is certainly not expecting any repeat performances of the highly uncomfortable, super illegal, and deeply erotic long-distance dirty talk, so he kind of has to make the most of that one experience. Based on how raw his dick feels, he may have already done this. He is not a young man anymore. He had no idea he was still capable of producing erections at this—this breakneck speed. There are limits to how much friction one man can endure.

So anyway, there he is trying to make it through his shift at FootLocker, which for the record is the most degrading job he’s ever had, yes including his brief stint at Hot Topic, without popping a visible boner, _is that too much to ask_ , and figuring out what alias he should adopt when he is inevitably forced to flee the country. (He’ll probably stick with Jordan Rodman.) Then his phone vibrates and he pulls it out because honestly, if he were a good employee he probably wouldn’t have to work at FootLocker, and he opens his new message in the middle of this all-ages, family friendly store that currently holds two elderly people, five children, and one extremely beleaguered-looking adult woman, and IT’S A PICTURE OF A PENIS.

Pete has received an unsolicited dick pic from an unknown number that he is now gaping at in the middle of a very public shoe store, and although he can think of at least three people on his casual sex roster who might pull some shit like this, he would definitely recognize any one of those penises. He could pick those penises out of a line-up. Blindfolded.

So: unknown erect penis held in unknown hand from unknown number. It’s not exactly _un_ welcome but he wouldn’t say it’s what he’s looking for. Especially not when he’s trying to be good, which he’s not great at. Still, he must admit, looking again (of course he looked again), this penis holds up. It’s a very nice penis. Under different circumstances, he would be enthusiastic about making its unexpected acquaintance.

The phone vibrates in Pete’s slightly sweaty hand. It’s a text message this time. It reads, _Your turn._

Normally, Pete would make a beeline for the employee bathroom. Sexting at work is the perfect way to liven up a tortuous 11-7 consisting of a striped referee polo, shoes _children_ have been allowed to pull out and ‘put back’ into boxes, and the stained socks of innumerable faceless strangers. He’s not very good at being good, never has been, but even Pete Wentz can tell this is probably against the rules, if there are rules. He hasn’t agreed to any rules. But he wants to—well—be worthy. Patrick is—he’s been given a gift. He doesn’t want to do anything that would risk it.

Pete texts back, _Normally id be super into sexting w/ mysterious strangers, but im sort of seeing someone right now. gonna have to pass. Also I don’t know who this is so u may have sent that to the wrong # (im a dude)_

“Wentz! Could you at least _pretend_ to be working?” His supervisor Marcia has come up behind him. Pete jumps six feet straight into the air. Thank god he wasn’t just standing there ogling the dick anymore, that would have been _awkward_. He went on a really unpleasant date with Marcia once. He’d hate to validate her suspicion that the root of his bad behavior is that he’s gay. He’s not; he really is just a dumpster fire of a human being. He’s working on it. In the meantime, he’s Pete Wentz: bisexual and bad at dates.

Pete moves over two aisles and pretends to be reshelving shoes, when really he’s just on one knee staring at his phone waiting for it to buzz again. And yeah, maybe he _is_ looking at the picture again, but you don’t know! He could have it open to delete it!

_Why sort of see someone when you can see all of me,_ vibrates the salacious response. Pete chokes on nothing. Maybe this is cosmic retribution for his aggressive pursuit of age-inappropriate Patrick. It seems like the more frantically he tries to ease off the more sex of dubious ethics the universe starts offering him.

The phone vibrates again. Same dick, different angle. Pete’s hands are shaking as he thumbs in, _bc i really like them, ok? please stop, u look great but im not interested in anyone else right now_.

Marcia is glaring over the top of the Adidas aisle. Pete starts shoving boxes into random places, wherever they’ll fit, so it looks like he’s doing something. He doesn’t really care that he’s actively making the store worse. Lucky it’s so hard to fire someone, especially when they’ve been on a date with their supervisor; Pete really is a shit employee. The highest praise that could possibly be offered is “Often shows up.” He will not be using FootLocker as a reference.

_Whats so great about this person anyway,_ his phone buzzes.

Pete will not tolerate any—ANY—kind of impugnation of Patrick’s character. _fuck off_ , he types back. He’s in Phone Settings, trying to figure out how to block this asshole’s number, when the next message comes.

_sry, I was fishing for compliments. I’m glad u really like me. it’s patrick, u dork. i got a cell phone._

_Well in that case_ , Pete types. This kid really is going to be the death of him, he thinks, making a beeline to the bathroom. Might as well put this unsinkable erection to good use.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is accidentally really short! I will make it up to you with smut next time. Yes?


	10. Chapter 10

Having a cell phone is really blowing the lid off this whole illicit affair with an older man thing. Also, Pete is _way_ more willing to be lewd over text messages, which feels like a gift from the universe to Patrick personally and leads to little agonies like a buzz and the words _i wish ur dick was in my mouth_ arriving in the middle of Pre-Calc, much to Patrick’s brain’s horror and Patrick’s penis’s delight.

It has been two weeks since Patrick has seen Pete in person. Two unbearable weeks, especially now that he knows what Pete’s bartskull tattoo looks like when Pete rubs his swollen cock across it. Two hellish weeks, with only the memory of Pete’s sloppy cheek-kiss, the fading smell of Pete’s t-shirt, and Joe’s snarky jokes about Pete’s unsavory character as proof that they ever even existed on the same physical plane.

It’s midterms, and Patrick has been too busy to slip away to the city. He’s also been slightly grounded, “for his own good,” because of the phone sex thing. Also probably because he accused his super chill folk singer dad of being prejudiced and insisted that if he’d been caught on the phone with a girl they’d have broken out the cigars and thrown a parade. It may have been a miscalculation, saying that out loud.

 _r u sure u can’t come tonight_ , Pete texts during English Comp. _I’ll make it worth ur while ^^_

_still under house arrest. Apparently i have 2 Regain Their Trust or something before im allowed to have any fun_

_do u ever think this would be easier if you were an orphan?_

_Or an adult?_ Patrick texts back. _yeah, constantly. imagine if i was batman!_

 _I have an idea_ , Pete texts during band. _would your parents let u go to the public library? to… study? v important 2 study_

_Yeah, as long as I don’t make it sound like I could wring even a drop of enjoyment from it_

_excellent. make sure ur there @ 7_

 

 

Patrick has no idea what Pete’s planning, but he can be found at the Glenview Public Library at 6:45 sharp, sitting up straight in a cubicle with a stack of unopened reference volumes and a Wolverine comic in front of him. His phone, outlawed in the library, is set to vibrate and balanced covertly on his knee. He figures he’s got a filthy phone call in the very public stacks to look forward to (breaking new laws everyday: the Pete Wentz adventure), or something that will hit a similar power chord of terrifying/sexy/exhilarating (sexhiliffying?), when someone taps him on the shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, I’ll put it away right now,” Patrick says as he turns, thinking it’s a librarian who takes the cell phone ban VERY seriously. Standing behind him, unbelievably, like an apparition from a dream, is Pete. Pete, dressed in grey skinny jeans, a white belt, a purple hoodie, and Etnies sneakers, is making this combo look like cloth of gold spun by actual gods. Pete is showing his teeth in his most devilish smile, a smile that slithers over Patrick’s skin, raising goosebumps and ill intentions. It is a smile of unspoken promises and sexual abandon. “Oh, I don’t want you to put it away,” Pete says, his voice like a purr. Patrick is reminded of the feeling he had when they first met, the feeling that he’s either being hit on or hunted or both.

Patrick jumps on him.

He knocks his chair over in the process, almost knocks Pete over, doesn’t care. Patrick leaps into Pete’s startled but receptive arms, wraps his legs around Pete’s waist, and buries his face in Pete’s neck, breathing in the _smell_ of him. And god but it’s good. Everything about this feeling, Patrick wants to last forever. Patrick will live and die in Pete’s arms.

Pete leans into it, pressing his forehead hard against Patrick’s head, and Patrick’s pretty sure he’s inhaling with a telling depth too, like Patrick smells even half as intoxicating as Pete. Then he squeezes his arms around Patrick, presses a kiss so fleeting Patrick may have imagined it to Patrick’s temple, and whispers, “Library patrons are staring. They disapprove of your wanton destruction of public furniture.”

Patrick lifts his head from the delicious hollow of Pete’s collarbone (Pete’s hoodie smells like the pit at a concert, smells like smoke and sweat and being pressed up against the stage, smells like screaming your heart out and almonds, why does Pete always smell like almonds, and the raw electricity arcing off the fretboards and striking the audience directly in the heart and Patrick can feel this smell in his teeth like he can feel mic feedback in his teeth. Pete’s hoodie smells like living forever and never growing up). Patrick stares guilelessly into Pete’s amber eyes. “I am just so relieved someone has finally come to explain the Dewey Decimal system to me,” he says sincerely, at normal volume, for the benefit of these supposed eavesdropping patrons and concerned citizens. “I am overwhelmed with gratitude.”

Patrick unwraps his legs and hops down lightly. Pete leaves his hands on Patrick’s waist and bows his head down so their foreheads are touching. Patrick’s heart drums out a 7/8 time signature, threatening to burst. He has never been so happy to see anyone in his _life_. He has known Pete over a month, now. Wild dogs could not convince him it is too soon to be in love, because if this isn’t what all those damn poems and movies are about, Patrick doesn’t give a shit, Patrick wants this instead.

“Hey,” whispers Pete.

“Hey,” whispers Patrick. “Did you miss me?”

“Miss you? I’m going to die of you.” Patrick wishes he could see Pete’s face as he says this, see if it’s sad or honest or joking or Pete’s trademark self-effacing combo of all three at once. Patrick with his manic heartbeat could say the same thing, and it would be 100% true. He doesn’t want to say it back if, for Pete, it’s not 100% true.

There is still a voice in Patrick’s head that says, _What would a guy like this want with a 16 year old. You’re a toy, and if you stop being fun, he won’t play with you anymore_.

Pete breaks two of three points of contact between them. Patrick’s skin freezes like a burn at the sudden absence. He wants Pete touching _all of him_. He wants to wear Pete like a goddamn Snuggie, to crawl inside Pete like a taun-taun. He is not disturbed by these possessive, consumptive urges. They feel natural, more than natural: inevitable. He wants to be Pete’s skin. He wants this more than he has ever wanted anything; he wants this with such impossible intensity that it exceeds any previous experience with the word _want_. Pete catches Patrick’s hand and tugs it. “C’mon, let’s go find that book,” he says significantly.

What’s a twitterpated sixteen year old to do? Like a horny lamb to the slaughter, Patrick lets himself be pulled along in Pete’s wake. There’s no place in the entire universe he’d rather be.

 

 

Pete is rougher with him this time—more forceful. More like the first time they met than the times he’s been so cautious, careful, handling Patrick like porcelain that will stain and crack beneath the pressure of his fingertips. More like he was when Patrick yelled “I’m TWENTY-FIVE” than when Patrick admitted he was in high school, was sixteen. The way Pete’s kissing him, Patrick gets the sense he’d be careful if he could, but the limits of his self-control have been exceeded, have been erased. That there’s nothing holding him back this time. That he won’t be able to stop himself from doing anything, everything.

 _About fucking time_ , Patrick thinks, while he can still think. Pete is everything a guy could ask for out of a sexual awakening, and more. Patrick thinks this while Pete pushes him back against a dimly lit, dusty shelf of atlases—like anyone has even opened an atlas since Mapquest was invented—and he thinks it while Pete kisses him hard, ravenously, like he’s trying to give Patrick a split lip, like he’s trying to check for cavities with his tongue. Patrick is so, so into this. Patrick moans in his throat, lips reverently attached to Pete’s, and gets his hands under Pete’s hoodie, finds the hem of Pete’s t-shirt. After all this hideous _waiting_ , it feels like there’s not a second to waste. The third millennium is just beginning but Patrick can vouch that this kiss, _this fucking kiss_ , is the most incredible thing that’s going to occur in the next thousand years. The next hundred thousand.

Seeking fingers find Pete-skin and Patrick almost passes out, he’s so happy. Pete kisses him harder and Patrick tastes blood. He doesn’t think it’s his. The unforeseeable moment wherein he ejaculates in a library is near at hand. Patrick’s hands scour the canvas of Pete’s skin, trying to tell by touch where the tattoos are, paying particular attention to the bartskull area. He grabs Pete’s hip with one hand, digs his thumb into the sensitive hollow just on the inside of the hip bone, and is gratified by the way Pete’s knees buckle for just a moment. One of Pete’s hands is locked behind Patrick’s head, ensuring nothing on heaven or earth can break this eternal kiss. His other hand is hovering over and around Patrick’s ass, and Patrick figures he needs a little help crossing the sacred belt barrier, so he shifts back suddenly, trapping Pete’s hand between butt and bookshelf. Startled, Pete freezes for half a second; this is too long, so Patrick bites his tongue (gently, ish) and dips two of his fingers into the waistband of Pete’s jeans.

Based on what he finds there, he does _not_ think Pete is wearing underwear, and this is just. Just. Pete uncups his hand from Patrick’s ass and slips it between them, which Patrick is excited about until Pete clamps it around Patrick’s wrist, preventing his hand from finding anything more exciting that Pete’s happy trail. (Which, not complaining, totally not complaining, this is an exciting feature of Pete’s anatomy. It deserves its own page in like all of these atlases. Just—Patrick had such high hopes about what territories he might map out, inspired as he is by aforementioned atlases. Pete’s making a cartographer out of him. There is so much Patrick is dying to discover, to explore.)

Firmly, in a way that brooks no argument, Pete plants Patrick’s straying hand on Pete’s waist, on top of his clothes. Breathing like Patrick is fifteen flights of stairs he’s just run up, Pete insists against Patrick’s lips, “Not. Yet.”

“Please,” Patrick whimpers. Bold, he presses his hips against Pete’s hips, so they can both feel how hard he is. He hopes this is a convincing argument. Patrick feels Pete’s own hard dick, imprisoned by skinny jeans and insistently solid. Inspired, Patrick rocks his hips against it. “How about now,” he whispers. He’d say anything, do anything, if Pete would just let him.

Pete moans out loud. He tights his grip on Patrick’s wrist and the back of Patrick’s head, repeats in a voice like it is fucking _costing him_ , “Not yet.”

Then he releases Patrick’s hand, cups his own hand around Patrick’s jaw, pushes their hips together with crushing force, and kisses Patrick so passionately, so powerfully, that Patrick doesn’t need to be touching anyone’s dick, Patrick comes in his pants.

Under normal circumstances, as he shudders and gasps and emits a supremely dumb throaty cry, Patrick would feel embarrassment. With Pete he begins to laugh, filthy and low, because he can’t even believe how good it is, how lucky he is. He doesn’t care if he’s an embarrassing mess. All he cares about is whether he can convince Pete to clean him up.

Pete’s teeth are on his throat and Patrick’s eyelids are fluttering, so Patrick sees the librarian first. “I’ve already called the police!” she says, in a voice Patrick finds a bit too loud for the library, personally. “Never in all my days have I seen such inappropriate conduct!” People seem to love shouting this at them. Like, stop walking in on us if you don’t want to see inappropriate conduct, Patrick thinks. This is not a complex concept.

Patrick’s laughing again. Pete’s gone rigid, white as a sheet with horror. After being caught saying ‘I’m gonna come’ by his own mother, Patrick is impervious to shame. Like anyone could be ashamed of being kissed, like _this_ , by Pete Wentz! Hell, Patrick half hopes they print it in the paper.

It’s his turn to grab Pete’s hand and tug. “Time to go,” he whispers to Pete. To the librarian he says, “See this is exactly why your circulation numbers are so low.” Pete’s hand secure in his, Patrick darts past the librarian, pulling Pete after him and laughing as loudly as he wants, and they run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to type faster, I'm running out of chapters to post. How do you feel about scanned notebook pages of my incomprehensible handwriting? That's good, right?


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I FORGOT TO POST THIS LAST NIGHT, I'm sorry. I have a good reason: I was watching every Fall Out Boy music video and narrating the timeline dramatically for someone who had never seen ANY of them. I mentioned vampire dandies in a casual conversation about Brendon Urie, as one does (it's always 2006 in this house), and he just looked at me blankly. I did lots of screaming, many videos were watched, and then I flopped around trying to decide if What A Catch is a more agonizing video when you don't see Pete at all or when you watch him go down with his ship of self-loathing and isolation after giving Patrick everything he can to make him happy. Then I tried to decide which member of Fall Out Boy my cat is most like. (Conclusion: Joe.) As you can see, I was doing very important things.
> 
> So here's this chapter now! It's slightly brutal, possibly line up some happiness for after reading. DEFINITELY DO NOT LISTEN TO WHAT A CATCH. Happier, sillier, sexier times with the next update. Thanks to each of you for reading.

Kissing Patrick goodnight—goodbye—down the street from his house (so his parents don’t catch him decidedly _not_ at the library and _not_ joylessly studying) leaves the bitterest taste in Pete’s mouth. After escaping the librarian’s wrath, they ran through a frozen cornfield, breath fogging clouds on a cloudless night and clasped fingers growing numb, to ensure they lost any potential police pursuers too. Pete thought they should find a stream to walk through so they’d be harder to track, but Patrick said “They won’t bring _dogs_ because people were caught kissing the library, dork. Let’s get coffee instead,” so they’d done that. It’s the suburbs, though, and everything closes at nine, including coffee shops, including the library. Pete had to walk Patrick home far too soon.

Now, unwilling to release Patrick’s cold hands even though they’ve already kissed goodnight three separate times, Pete asks, “Are you sure there’s not, like, a tree I could climb up to your window?”

“There is no way I am sneaking you into my bedroom while I’m not even allowed to close my _door_ ,” Patrick says. “Anyway since you won’t let me touch anything below your belt anyway, I’d die of—of proximity frustration. If you spent the night.”

“Okay, I give in, you can manhandle my feet and ankles to your filthy heart’s content,” says Pete.

Patrick kisses Pete on the tip of his cold, runny nose. March in Chicago does not fuck around. “Well in _that_ extremely erotic case,” Patrick laughs, “ _goodnight_ , Pete.”

And so—after clasping Patrick to his chest like they might fuse together if he holds on hard enough and stealing one more burning kiss—Pete trudges back to the station alone. He waits for his train alone. Dully, he rides the empty fucking commuter train in aching silence all alone. After what is either a second or an eternity of traveling to no particular place Pete wants to go, he returns to his tiny empty apartment alone.

Pete sits by himself in the dark for a while. Until sunrise, he guesses. At least, after some unmarked amount of time, it isn’t dark anymore. That probably indicates sunrise. Pete is breathing so slowly he’s not sure he’s not dead.

Sometimes Pete doesn’t do too well on his own.

The reason he ditched work early to go out to the suburbs—the reason he _had_ to see and touch the light and warmth of Patrick now, today—is that Pete can feel it starting to happen. He’s starting to self-destruct again. It’s like every day someone’s taking 10% of the oxygen out of the room, so at first you don’t really notice, then you start to feel a little funny, then you’re suffocating, then you’re dead.

He’s trying to tell himself he’s imagining it. That maybe it won’t happen anymore, now that he’s found Patrick, the person the universe created him for—now that he’s so happy. But Pete doesn’t believe it. Pete knows Patrick isn’t the cure.

Pete knows there isn’t one.

Pete has lost people, in his life, for asking too much of them. For thinking—for asking them to save him. (You can try to find your own salvation, can try to soak it up quietly, quietly—can try to be saved on the small scale every day, which is what he did today with Patrick—but most people. They don’t like it catching you at it. They don’t like to feel like you’re _expecting_ something. Pete doesn’t want to ask too much; Pete always asks too much.)

Pete has learned that when he can’t stand to be around himself anymore, no one else can, either. Pete has learned it’s better not to ask. It’s better to be alone. At least alone, you can spare other people the suffering. The burden of sitting beside a lifeless, oxygen-sucking black hole that wears the face of someone they recognize but isn’t a person at the moment, not really.

Pete sits alone in the dark until the dark turns to light and Pete doesn’t feel anything at all. He doesn’t have the energy to get up. He tries to convince himself he does, that he can force it, but all his brain’s good for is whispering different ways he can die. The weight of his self-loathing, his disgust, his terrifying fucking _indifference_ , is so great upon his rotten heart, his cracking ribs, that he cannot move. How peaceful it would be, to never move again.

The only thing that scares Pete more than existing is not.

Not long after what Pete assumes is either dawn or the onset of raging hurricanes of fire that signify the apocalypse, his phone goes off. He knows by the tone that it’s a text message from Patrick, and for that he can move—for that he almost feels like a human again. Just a flicker of life, the length of the message, quickly guttered. It’s not much, the message: just a smiley face and the word _morning_. But it’s enough. Now that Patrick is awake in the world, Pete can take at least one breath. Pete can stand.

Achingly—and how welcome it is to ache, after hours and hours of numbness—Pete gets up. There’s no time to sleep, so he shambles for the shower. Maybe today will turn it around, he tells himself without conviction. Maybe the inviting glitter of his razor on the sink is mistaken.

_Hurting for you_ , he texts Patrick back.

Sometimes, Pete doesn’t do too well on his own.

 

 

After five days of this, slipping deeper, deeper, each of his minutes spent either sleeping or staring blankly in the dark, Pete honestly can’t tell the difference, Pete does what he swore to himself he’d never, ever do.

He’s been ignoring band practice and calls from his friends, calls from Mikey, even a call from his mom. He’s barely been making it to work. One day this week he was four and a half hours late for a five hour shift. Another day he took the bus all the way to FootLocker and then just stood there outside of it, nauseous with existential dread, unable to move, until he got so cold he went back to the bus shelter and just got on the first bus that pulled up. He rode it around, a hollow boy, until it made it back to the depot at the end of the day, til the driver turned around and said, “Look kid, you’ve gotta get off.”

Today Pete can’t even get off the couch. Nothing matters. The world is vast, grey, empty. Everyone he’s ever known is a ghost.

Except Patrick. In the entire spectral, haunted universe, Patrick is the only thing he’s ever seen in color.

So Pete breaks the rule. Patrick—Patrick is the common denominator in a lot of rule-breaking, lately. If Pete was a stronger man, he’d stay away. He’d make believe this apartment is his coffin and he’s dead inside it, ignoring the outside world until it all just… goes away. This would be the best and kindest thing he could ever do for Patrick. For everyone. Today Pete really believes this. It isn’t his best day.

The rule is this: Pete is never, ever, _ever_ to pull Patrick into the grey. Pete is never to burden Patrick with this—with him. With this particular monochromatic part of him. At the start of this whatever-this-is, Pete knew he must protect Patrick; must not cheapen or degrade Patrick in any way. He swore to himself he’d never sully Patrick with his dirty, newsprint grey.

Well. Pete and vows have never really gotten along. He’s not even surprised at himself as he breaks it. Pete thinks there’s nothing Pete could do, anymore, that would surprise him. It’s all just one long dark descent into shit. Even the free fall is tedious, by now. Always so… disappointingly familiar.

Pete picks up his phone off his face, where he left it, and dials Patrick’s number without ever making the decision to. By the way Patrick answers, Pete can tell right away it’s not a good time for him and his bullshit. He almost hangs up. Almost is the most he can do anything, today, seems like.

“Hey, what’s up?” Patrick answers. His golden voice is tight, smooshed, not the usual giddy, sexy purr he answers with. This is code for it being a bad time. Code for _Joe’s in the room_ , or _my mom’s on a rampage_ , or _dinner’s in five minutes and I can’t talk long_. Maybe it’s even code for _I don’t want to talk to you_. Pete doesn’t know. Codes can mean anything.

Too long must have gone by since Patrick answered, because he says, “Hello? Pete?”

Pete stirs his voice up out of the lightless depths of himself, where it has lain rusting and unused all day. All of yesterday, too, if he’s remembering right. It’s always hard to tell from underwater. The world is murky, brackish, blurred. It took twenty minutes to tie his shoes, the last time he tried to leave the house. Once they were finally on, he was too exhausted from the effort to go anywhere after all, and laid back down. Pete glances at his feet, involving the Herculean effort of lifting his head. Yep. He’s got sneakers on. Maybe the shoe-tying episode was today. Maybe not.

“Hi ‘Trick,” Pete says. His voice sounds like an accordion excavated from a prehistoric dig site. Which is a weird place to find an accordion anyway. He’s the asshole who started this phone call, so he forces himself to make an effort. “How was your day?”

“Good, actually! I’m officially ungrounded! I thought, maybe I could see you this weekend? Um, if you aren’t busy, maybe I could… stay?”

Pete knows he’s supposed to be excited about this. He is, he is. But the fuses aren’t quite connected right; the circuits are loose. The part that sparks with excitement isn’t plugged into anything. The current doesn’t reach his tongue. Instead of saying _absolutely yes, that is the only thing I want in this life, if you’re not careful I’m going to kidnap you and take you where no one will ever find us and I will never give you back, when can you leave are you leaving now_ , which is what he wants to say, what he’d usually say, what he _feels_ in whatever dried-up dead part of him is still responsible for feelings—instead to saying that, Pete says a different true thing, which is, “I don’t really know if this weekend is a great idea.” _There’s poison in the well, kid. Don’t drink from it._

Maybe seeing Patrick would bring Pete back to the surface—back to life. Or maybe it would cost him Patrick forever. He doesn’t have the energy to risk it.

Regret. The feelings-organ wheezes and jumpstarts an outpouring of thick, sweet, choking _regret_. “Listen, it was a mistake to call,” Pete says. The feeling is surging right directly into his tear ducts. His throat is closing. He’s going to cry. He has to get off the phone before he cries.

“Pete, wait! What’s going on? Why _did_ you call?” The concern in Patrick’s voice is so _real_ , Pete does start crying. He tries to keep it quiet, out of his voice. He’s not sure he even has the energy to do that much right.

“I just wanted to hear your voice,” Pete bites out. Things are getting messy on his end. Patrick shouldn’t have to hear this. “I have to go. Talk to you later.” Pete hangs up the phone, hoping Patrick didn’t notice his voice hitch on that sob. Pete slides his phone across the floor, out of his reach, and rides the crying out.

Patrick doesn’t call back. This is for the best, Pete tells himself. Eventually, he slips under the oblivion of sleep.


	12. Chapter 12

Patrick doesn’t know what the fuck is going on and he’s not going to wait to find out.

“I’m going to tell Mom you have a secret cell phone,” Megan chirps. She is lying in his bed reading one of his comics. He’s sure she’s not handling it with the appropriate respect.

“Well, you can do that if you want to, I guess,” Patrick says, keeping his voice causal even though he’s started charging around the room shoving essentials into his backpack. “I would’ve thought you’d at least want to hear my counteroffer, though.” Wallet, underwear, headphones, toothpaste. Is there anything he’s forgetting? He grabs his pre-calc book—he _does_ have homework—and a clean t-shirt, just in case. Oh—deodorant. Gotta have deodorant, Pete makes him sweat like he’s on a Stairmaster. Patrick does not own condoms, so he can’t pack any. He makes a mental note to look into that.

“Counteroffer?” Megan has put down the comic. She wears a shrewd look on her face.

“You tell Mom nothing— _nothing_ —about what happens tonight. And, let’s say, over the weekend. You let her assume that we were here together all night and left for school together in the morning. If she asks you directly about it, you lie.”

“Oh my dear, stupid brother, why would I do that?”

Patrick does not care for Megan’s tone. “I’ll let you babysit yourself tonight. Mom and Dad won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon—like, almost twenty-four hours from now. Twenty-four long, glorious, unsupervised hours. But if you’re not interested…”

Megan takes the deal. Patrick knew she would. Making sure she’s out of earshot—he doesn’t trust that kid for a second—Patrick calls Joe. “I really, really, _really_ need a ride,” Patrick says. “To Pete’s. I can’t really explain why. I’ll give you gas money.”

“Of course,” says Joe, with a readiness suggested he needed even less convincing than Patrick offered. Joe picks him up in his dad’s SUV and drives him half an hour to Logan Square. No traffic at this time of day. Joe doesn’t ask any questions; they talk normally, casually, about school and the drum kit Patrick wants for his birthday and Joe’s job at Smoothie King.

When they get to Pete’s building, Joe does ask one question. “Do you want me to come up with you?”

Patrick thinks on this a moment. He really doesn’t know what he’s walking into. But he doesn’t think it’s anything Joe can help with. Also, what if Pete’s totally normal and fine and he was just being weird on the phone? Joe would think Patrick took advantage of his kindness for a booty call. “This part I’ve got covered,” Patrick says, hoping it’s true. “But I’m gonna have to lie like crazy to my mom about this, and she still might kill me, so…”

Joe places one hand over his heart and holds the other up. “I solemnly swear to agree to whatever alibi I’m involved with upon questioning.” Joe lowers his hand, tugs on his bangs, clearly has more to say. “Just… call me if things are weird in there. I’ll be back as soon as you can think it. Deal?”

For the second time that night, Patrick makes a deal. Then he shoulders his backpack, waves goodbye to Joe, and disappears into Pete’s building.

 

 

No one answers when Patrick bangs on Pete’s door. No one answered knocking, either, or calling “Hello? Pete?”. Finally it occurs to Patrick to just try the knob. The door’s unlocked. His guts get cold.  God, he hopes Pete’s all right. He hopes Pete’s _in_ there. He hopes Pete’s alone.

First thing, Patrick locks the door behind him after entering. Second thing, he hunts for a light switch. It is extremely dark in here. Finally Patrick walks into the three-headed floor lamp and flicks one of the bulbs to life.

“Oh, hello Patrick,” comes a small voice from a particularly ill-kempt pile of laundry on the futon. “Kinda hoped you’d leave when I didn’t come to the door.”

Patrick surveys the scene before him grimly. What he’d taken to be the projectile vomit of a clothes dryer is actually Pete, looking unshowered, unshaven, and incredibly rough. He is tangled in at least two sheets and one blanket. He has sneakers on, but no pants—just boxers. It takes a lot, like really a _lot_ , of personal strength not to yell at him in exasperation. Pete is clearly not okay.

“When you called me earlier, I just got the feeling… something was weird with you. Possibly because of how you sounded absolutely terrible and then hung up on me. So crazily, stupidly, I decided I’d just… show up. And take care of you. If I could.”

Pete’s got an idiot look on his face, like he’s about to say he doesn’t need help, so Patrick bowls right over him. “And you _obviously_ need help, so don’t try to tell me you don’t. Are you sick? Do you have some kind of disease? You look about dead.”

Pete is worming his head beneath a pillow, trying to escape Patrick’s scrutiny without being bothered to use his arms. “It’s complicated,” Pete says, one eye covered by pillowcase. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“Are you contagious?” Patrick asks patiently.

Pete laughs bleakly. “You have no idea.”

“Okay, well, as a guy who’s currently acing AP Bio, I feel qualified to diagnose this as probably psychological and not caused by an airborne pathogen. I’m getting into bed with you.”

Pete doesn’t protest, so Patrick kicks off his shoes—he’s not an animal—and slides under the covers next to Pete. Just _thinking_ that sentence a few hours ago would have put his pants in mortal peril, but the act itself is all tenderness, no sexual tension. He lays facing Pete, smoothing Pete’s bangs out of his eyes carefully. He looks into Pete’s unusually flat eyes. “Will you tell me what’s going on?” he asks as gently as he possibly can.

Pete frees one of his arms from the hybrid tangle of human and blanket he has become and reaches for Patrick’s hand. Patrick squeezes the strangely fragile-seeming offering in both of his own hands. It turns out he is capable of being patient. He looks into Pete’s drowning-sad eyes, strokes and holds Pete’s hand in his own, and he waits.

“Sometimes the world goes grey,” Pete whispers at last. “Like falling down a hole—an endless hole, with no bottom, so I fall forever. I didn’t ever want you to see this.”

“Yeah, well, a lot of shit in this relationship hasn’t gone how I planned, either,” Patrick soothes. “So this has happened before? What did you do last time?”

Pete’s mouth twists into the shape of a smile, but there’s not much behind it. “I’m glad you’re here after all,” Pete says. He hides his face in Patrick’s chest. Patrick pets his hair.

“Me too,” he says, and means it.

 

 

In the morning, Patrick opens all of the blinds and starts cleaning. He gathers up laundry, including stripping the dirty sheets Pete is trying to hide in, into garbage bags. Pete apparently has no hamper, and neither of them knows if there are laundry machines in the building. Patrick pushes Pete into the shower and regretfully does not join him there, though he does steal a few lingering glances that will fuel sleepless, masturbatory nights for weeks to come. He takes all garbage and dishes so dirty they have become garbage and throws it out. He unearths a deeply questionable-looking sponge and wipes down visible surfaces, hoping it at least doesn’t make them dirtier. He finds some candles so he lights them—they’re cranberry scented, and can only improve the fug that has settled over the apartment. He cracks a window to circulate some air and finds nothing but bran cereal to give Pete for breakfast. He writes a grocery list on a sticky note and slaps it onto Pete’s fridge. It reads: _FOOD,_ _LITERALLY ANY FOOD_. At some point he realizes Pete’s been in the shower way longer than necessary and goes in to get him, although again, not in any way he’s ever fantasized about.

While Pete is toweling off, looking decidedly more like an alive human, Patrick tackles the bathroom counter, which is a riot of bottles and tubes. He finds an orange prescription bottle that instructs ‘take 1x daily by mouth,’ dated for over a month ago, that has at least 60 pills in it.

“Hey, Pete?” he asks. Pete’s towel-tried hair is adorably askew, sticking up at all angles like an emo anime character. He is wearing only the rather small yellow towel around his waist. Patrick might actually be drooling. He really missed his chance to give Pete, like, a single dishtowel to dry off with. He’s the one in charge right now. He could’ve just said everything else was dirty. “Are you maybe supposed to be taking these?”

After that, things get easier. The question has the effect of cracking Pete open. Words start flowing out of his lovely silver mouth again. Patrick feels like they can fix anything, as long as Pete’s talking.

“I have bipolar,” Pete says with the weight of a confession. “I used to say, _I am bipolar_ , but I really didn’t want it to be true. Maybe words are words and it is what it is, and it feels more like it has me, like I’m not the one with the reins here, I’m just a victim of ruthless chemistry, but… Sometimes I feel so good, so whole, so _normal_ , I stop taking the meds. I don’t like them. I don’t always need them. And sometimes even when I _am_ taking them, I go grey, I zombie out. So then I figure, what’s the point? If I’m gonna feel like shit anyway, at least let me feel like _me_ , you know?” Pete won’t look at Patrick. He’s just staring dully at his own fogged reflection in the bathroom mirror. He won’t meet his own eyes, either. “I should have told you, should have let you make an informed decision about me. About whether you wanted… this.”

Patrick laughs. It is not the most sensitive response, and he doesn’t mean to interrupt, but the words just pop out of him. “Right, because I was completely up front about everything when we first met.”

For just a moment, Pete flashes a crooked smile, toothy as a crocodile. It’s like clouds parting to let sun shine through. Or—it’s like a grey cloudy day, the sky bloated and aching with unfallen rain, at the moment when the whole thing finally shatters open and the tortured sky lets go of its burden. It’s rainfall. It’s a downpour. Pete’s smile is a tsunami and Patrick is swept out to sea.

“Here, I’ll take one,” says Pete, reaching out for his pills.

Patrick hesitates. “You don’t have to. I don’t want you to, if you don’t want to.”

“They help me not be like this.” Pete’s face is flat and dull again.

Patrick shrugs. “It’s okay with me if you’re like this.” Pete’s face registers surprise. Instead of handing him the bottle, Patrick takes Pete’s hand. It’s still thrilling. “It’s part of you. I want—I want all of you.”

Still looking like Patrick has just swallowed a live hand grenade, Pete says, “No one has ever said that to me before. Not any of it.”

“Believe me,” Patrick urges quietly. He doesn’t know where this is coming from, exactly, but he’s never meant anything more.

Pete stares at him for a long, still moment. His face subtly rearranges itself. Patrick’s can’t quite tell what’s changed, but it looks happier than before. More peaceful. “Okay,” Pete says. “I will.”

Patrick squeezes his hand, eyes drifting without his permission to all the bare skin on Pete’s body. It is not an appropriate time for the thoughts he’s having, but his thoughts don’t seem to care. Appropriateness has never been Pete and Patrick’s best thing. Patrick starts to blush, thinking about what’s under that towel. Pete’s never let him see even this much in person—in _touching_ range. Patrick’s fingertips tingle and itch with wanting.

“If you call my school and tell them I’m sick, I can spend the whole weekend with you,” Patrick offers. “If you want.” He’s trying to sound calm and like he isn’t thinking himself into a hard-on. _Be emotionally supportive_ , he chastises his penis. _If Pete wants to be alone_ , Patrick informs his penis sternly, _we are_ leaving.

But Pete’s eyes shine with a little more life than before. Maybe Patrick can press life back into him with his lips; maybe he can say with his skin what Pete means to him; maybe he can capture some of Pete’s shine and reflect it back into him, if they hold each other tightly enough. Pete, maybe thinking the same thing, uses their linked hands to tug Patrick closer to him. Suddenly Patrick is one vibrating inch from Pete’s warm, damp, bare skin.

“I very much want,” murmurs Pete, staring without blinking into Patrick’s eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter next: Patrick takes a shower.


	13. Chapter 13

Pete is pretty sure Patrick is taking advantage of him while he’s vulnerable, but when Patrick tugs off Pete’s towel, Pete doesn’t stop him—Pete only pulls him closer. For one long, intense moment during which Pete at least cannot breathe, they just stare at each other. Then Patrick’s lips collide with his like a car crash and all the feeling surges back into the universe and Pete fixes his hands on Patrick’s hips and lifts him onto the sink and leans into him, kissing for his life, kissing like if he can obliterate himself in Patrick’s mouth he won’t have to be the one to enforce the illegal-below-the-waist rule, like if he can just kiss Patrick hard enough, _deep_ enough, it will unlock the secrets of time and Patrick will age two years all at once, under Pete’s lips and hands become a man, or at least a consenting adult.

“I’m gonna have a heart attack,” Pete pants into Patrick’s skin when Patrick moves his mouth to Pete’s neck. Patrick’s hands are carefully, carefully affixed to Pete’s upper arms. He hasn’t dared move them—afraid to push too far, afraid Pete will ask him to stop.

The word stop is not even in Pete’s vocabulary right now. It’s a word Pete has never even thought or heard. It might as well be Latin, Welsh. You could scream it at him right now and he’d have absolutely no idea what you were trying to say.

“Is this okay?” Patrick asks Pete’s throat.

“I’m supposed to ask you that,” Pete says. Gasps, really. His lungs aren’t working right. The way Patrick is kissing his neck—fuck, okay? Just _fuck_. And here he’d thought the world _grey_.

“Ask away, then.” Patrick sounds like he can’t quite breathe, either. His mouth is working its way across Pete’s collarbone now. His hands are still frozen in place. Pete tries to move, since the hands won’t—rises to tiptoes, leans further into Patrick, trying to dislodge those hands, empower them to move lower. Technically he’s not breaking the rule if it’s Patrick who’s breaking the rule. Not that Pete’s so great with rules. It’s hard to remember why, with Patrick’s tongue on his nipple, but he’s reasonably sure this one is important.

“God, oh god, isthisokay,” Pete barely manages.

Patrick stops licking just long enough to hiss “ _Yessss_.” The syllable buzzes Pete’s bare skin. Patrick’s hands refuse to move. Pete will surely die of this. Naked and aching, he’ll die in a bathroom, under Patrick Stumph’s touch. What a hell of a way to go. He doesn’t mind at all. In fact, if this is his death, he welcomes it.

Patrick’s lips break away from Pete’s skin and Pete whimpers with the loss. “Tell you what,” Patrick says breathlessly, lips shining and swollen and impossibly sexy. His face is flushed, his eyes glowing. Up close they are flecked with gold. He is so rosy, so pale. He could be a sculpture. Pete would like to be the one to mold the clay. “While you call my school, I’ll take off all my clothes and get in the shower. You do whatever seems best to you.”

Yep. It’s official. Pete has a heart attack, dies.

 

 

Pete can see Patrick’s outline, silhouetted in torturous detail on his shower curtain. He is watching Patrick’s outline rub the outline of Patrick’s cock. He is trying to imagine the actual Patrick inside the shower. He is trying to get through this phone call. He is trying not to pass out.

“Yes, this is Patrick Stumph’s father speaking,” Pete says in a strangled voice. “Mr…. well, Mr. Stumph should suffice.” Pete does not even know the name of the man he is impersonating. This is probably an inauspicious start to his career of criminal impersonation. God, who knew this pink- mouthed golden-haired 16 year old _dork_ would turn him into a multiple felon? He couldn’t even make this shit up.

The school secretary sounds suspicious. She probably gets an awful lot of young-sounding motherfuckers fraudulently calling their friends out sick. “If I could just get you to verify some information, Mr. Stumph,” she says coolly. “Starting with your son’s date of birth?”

Pete almost laughs out loud. If he tried he’d probably choke, though, based on the sounds Patrick’s outline has started making. It reminds Pete wonderfully, sinfully of Patrick’s singing. He clears his throat. What an inconvenient time to spring the end-all be-all of erections.

Luckily, the date on which Patrick Stumph turns 17 is fucking etched into every neuron of Pete’s dysfunctional brain, every cell of Pete’s blood, every molecule of Pete’s body. Knowledge of this date is literally all that sustains him. The fact that each fucking day brings _this_ particular date 24 hours closer is how Pete is even holding it together right now. Patrick’s 17 th birthday is the sum total of how he’s making it through. “April 27, ’84,” Pete says. For once he sounds smooth and confident. He is _totally_ fucking sure of this date. There are so, so many things he is planning for that date.

“Okay, Mr. Stumph. And your son’s student ID number?”

Pete has no idea what Patrick’s student ID number is, and neither does Patrick’s real dad, probably. Luckily Patrick’s pants are right here, on the floor at his feet. (This is lucky for many reasons.) Pitching his voice as low and old as possible, Pete rumbles, “Well let me see here.” He fumbles Patrick’s wallet out of his discarded jeans and flips to his student ID, tucked behind his driver’s license.

Pete has to stop for a moment just to revel in the awkward glory of the pictures on these IDs. He is never going to let Patrick live this down. Never. If Patrick didn’t need these pieces of identification, probably, Pete would frame them on his wall. In the school ID picture it looks like Patrick is wearing _lip gloss_. His sideburns are out of control. You can tell he was just made to take off his hat, because his hair is staticky on top. Pete adores him.

“Mr. Stumph? Hello?” prompts the secretary. She probably has a dozen other liars to talk to this morning. Pete is wasting her time.

“Sorry, just had to find my son’s ID,” Pete enunciates loudly. From the shower Patrick emits a groan that has _nothing_ to do with sex and _everything_ to do with terrible ID photos. Pete reads off the number, provides a probably unnecessary description of Patrick’s condition that makes it sound like he has a necrotic virus, and that’s it, he’s done, Patrick’s off the hook.

Pete is only just on it, though.

Pete’s _entire_ hormonal apparatus and system of reproductive hardware is championing the case that he should dive into the shower now, dick first, and ask questions later. (Or never. Never’s good too.) His brain, though. It’s always the damn brain.

“Before I get in there, we need to lay down some ground rules,” Pete calls into the shower timidly. Patrick reverts to the loud, sexy kind of moaning instead of answering.

“Like, rule one: if I do anything that is even the tiniest bit not okay, you have to tell me immediately.”

“I am _hugely_ not okay with you standing out there talking at me when you could be in here touching me,” Patrick offers unhelpfully. Maybe he’s just getting into the spirit of ground rules, Pete tells himself without conviction.

“Rule two: I am _not_ having sex with you, and I have to be really clear about that from this side of the shower curtain, because I might forget on that side.”

“I’ll help you forget,” purrs Patrick like a depraved sex kitten. Pete’s dick responds strongly to the suggestion. Patrick is really not being very cooperative with Pete’s moral agenda.

“Rule three: I’m serious about rule two, and I won’t get in there at all if you won’t agree to follow it. You are _sixteen years old_ and I’m not going to have sex with you.”

“Peeeeete,” whines Patrick. “What is the _point_ of having a torrid forbidden affair if you won’t get in here and debauch me already?”

Pete pulls back the shower curtain. Nothing could have prepared him for the sight of wet naked Patrick, lazily pulling on his swollen red cock, shoving his wet hair out of his eyes and scowling. Pete about collapses. Getting into that shower is really, really, _really_ not a good idea.

“The point is I’m not trying to _have_ an affair,” Pete says, when he gets his breath back. He is really very impressed by his personal discipline right now. He is displaying, like, a truly uncharacteristic level of self-control. “I’m trying to have _you_.”

“By all means,” Patrick starts, grinning. Pete steps into the shower just so he can cover Patrick’s impossible mouth with his hand and shut him up.

“To _keep_ you,” Pete rephrases. Patrick stops biting the edge of Pete’s hand for a second and just looks at him, eyes wide. Pete carefully drops his hand, unmuzzling that dangerous, really unbelievably pink, _so_ _fucking_ _illegal_ mouth. All of his willpower, _all of it_ , is being burned up by the effort of keeping every filthy inch of him off of every luminescent inch of Patrick. “Okay?”

“ _Okay_ ,” says Patrick.  He says it with frustration but Pete can tell, by his eyes, that what Pete said meant something, somewhere underneath the churning sex-crazed layers of Patrick’s brain, deep in the part that can still think.

Pete leans in like he’s about to kiss Patrick and then stops half an inch away. Just because he knows it will annoy Patrick, he grins into the warm spray spattering up off Patrick’s skin and says, “Patrick, you’d tell me if you were a cop, right?”

“You are _not_ cute,” Patrick says. “I know you think you’re cute but you are _wrong_. If you don’t stop with the 21 Jump Street thing and kiss me _right now_ , I swear to god and Johnny Depp—”

But then they don’t get to find out what Patrick would do, because finally, Pete kisses him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys sustain me. Thank you for being here! Even more nudity and preposterousness up next.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sex acts and public yelling! Please enjoy! Your reviews continue to make me the happiest creep on earth. <3

The nice thing about agreeing to ground rules is that with those out of the way, Pete isn’t trying to stop Patrick’s hands from wandering anymore. There are a lot of things Pete isn’t trying to stop anymore. Patrick is eager to catalogue them all.

They are in the shower together, and it is better than Patrick’s dizziest daydream, and he’d be lying if he didn’t admit, at least to himself, that sex being off the table actually takes a lot of pressure off—lets him throw himself into the exploration without worrying he won’t be ready for what he finds.

Pete barely touches him at first, just clasps Patrick’s face in his hands and kisses him like he’s so, so grateful he’s allowed to. Like he doesn’t expect to be allowed to for long, so he’s just drinking it in while he can. Patrick really, really wants to be the one to show Pete what it’s like, when people stay.

Reverent kissing may be enough for Pete, but it’s not for Patrick. Now that the border guard has been lifted, Patrick experiments with holding and squeezing Pete’s ass, digging his grip into the handholds of Pete’s hipbones until he squirms, running his fingers through Pete’s pubic hair, finding the ticklish spots on Pete’s inner thighs. Pete jolts like Patrick’s fingers are tiny lightning bolts when they graze Pete’s taut testicles, wrap around the animal warmth of his erection. Patrick uses one hand to trace the bartskull lightly with his fingernails, skidding in the shower slick, and starts to stroke Pete’s penis with the other.

This ends the kiss. Pete drops his forehead to Patrick’s shoulder and stares down at Patrick’s hands, moving between them. His whole body is trembling. “Fuck, Patrick,” Pete whispers. “I shouldn’t let you—”

“Rule four,” Patrick says, nipping Pete’s ear. “ _I_ decide what I can handle. _You_ trust me to know what that is.”

Pete’s quiet after that, except for the whimpering, which grows louder and throatier and more urgent until Pete is gasping with every stroke. His hands are locked behind Patrick’s head. He still hasn’t let himself touch Patrick anywhere below the _neck_ , forget about the waist. Since it seems okay for Patrick to touch him, Patrick brushes his own painfully hard dick against Pete’s leg. Pete makes a sound like he’s being run over, but it seems like a good thing, and he doesn’t stop Patrick from sliding himself between Pete’s thighs, which apply just enough tight, wet pressure that Patrick can’t help himself, Patrick’s hips start thrusting on their own. Patrick moves into and against Pete’s slick thighs rhythmically, in time with the motions of his hand on Pete’s cock, and as the time signature increases there’s no complaint, so he doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop, and—

Pete makes the punched-in-the-gut sound again, cries Patrick’s name, and comes all over Patrick’s stomach and hand. Patrick barely has time to register what’s happening before chaste, hands-free-as-bluetooth, follow-these-dumb-rules Pete Wentz drops to his knees in the shower and starts licking his own cum off Patrick’s belly. This is it, Patrick thinks, this is the ultimate sensation, nothing in life will ever feel as good as this again, he has peaked, and then Pete’s mouth closes around Patrick’s dick and he’s wrong again, there are more feelings on heaven and earth and in Pete’s mouth, Horatio—Patrick’s thoughts melt, turn to gibberish, the world narrows to the sensation, the feeling, the warmwet touch of Pete sucking him, there is nothing else.

Patrick comes in a burst of glorious inevitability, not given enough advance notice to warn Pete with anything but a possibly operatic cry. For a few minutes he’s not capable of anything more than standing there, stunned, under the showerhead. Honestly Patrick feels he deserves props for being able to stand at all. Pete is humming. Pete stands, all teeth and wicked grin and burning amber eyes, and spins Patrick around so he’s facing the spray, hot rivulets exquisite and shivery down his tender burst-open skin. Pete wraps his arms around Patrick’s chest, tucks his chin into Patrick’s shoulder, nuzzles his wet head against Patrick’s blissed-out face.

“I am absolutely crazy about you,” Pete sighs, sounding totally contented. “I hope that was okay. I warned you I wouldn’t be able to control myself.”

Patrick leans back into Pete’s embrace, treasuring every inch of skin-to-skin contact. Without Pete holding on to him, he thinks he’d float off into space. “This is so much better than third period gym class,” Patrick sighs, because he doesn’t know how to put what he’s feeling into words he’s willing to say out loud.

Pete laughs softly into his chest, giving Patrick goosebumps all over his body. They stay that way, each supporting the other, until the hot water runs out, and then a little longer.

 

 

“I’m going to cook for you,” Pete had announced, which is what got them into this mess to begin with. Honestly Patrick was so sexually gratified and relieved Pete was acting like he could see in color again he would have agreed to anything, even though he probably had access to enough information to know even then that this was a terrible idea.

They have been at the grocery store for going on an hour, now. With each passing minute it becomes increasingly clear that Pete has _no_ fucking idea what he’s doing. It is an actual miracle, Patrick thinks, that this guy has survived in the wild even this long.

The first hurdle they are facing—and yes, unbelievably, they are _still_ on the _first_ hurdle; Patrick takes back everything snarky he ever said about the speed at which his mother does errands—is what Pete wants to make. Deciding isn’t the problem; deciding is the opposite of the problem. Pete has decided at least four times. He’s a natural at deciding. A total decision wizard. The problem is that, by the time they find the first half of the ingredient list, Pete has seen something else (the butcher counter; a pineapple; a sale sign; the fucking color green) and decided all over again about what he wants to cook.

“Patrick! Have you ever _seen_ such a beautiful pork chop? We’re having pork chops.” “Holy shit, _pasta_! It’s Chicago, it’s basically Italy, we have to make Italian, I will _dazzle_ you with my soon-to-be-famous chicken cacciatore.” “Ooh, you know what I haven’t had in years? Broccoli cheddar soup. How hard could that be? Soup? I’ll bake you a _bread bowl_ , Patrick, that’s how much I like you.”

Throughout all of this, of course, Pete is running through the grocery store like a sugared-up kid, singing and trying to get Patrick to dance and sneaking kisses onto Patrick’s neck and generally being the most beautiful pain in the ass ever, so Patrick’s not complaining too much. When Pete proposes with apparent sincerity they have a feast of candy and s’mores for dinner, though, Patrick senses it is time for the grown-up to intervene. (Also his bran cereal wore off, like, two hours ago, and if he leaves it up to Pete they’ll probably both starve to death in this grocery store, surrounded by food.) Right now the grown-up is him, so:

“Chips and salsa really is my favorite meal. What if we just get, like, a huge pile of stuff you can eat on tortilla chips?”

Pete’s eyes sparkle like disco balls with the suggestion. He immediately takes it way too far. They end up with fresh pico de gallo, guacamole, queso blanco, ingredients for pork carnitas, salsa verde, and strawberries and marscapone that Pete insists he can make into dessert salsa. They also get no fewer than four types of tortilla chips: blue corn, scoops, nacho cheese-flavored, and organic coconut oil and sea salt chips “to be healthy.”

“This is two bags of chips _per person_ ,” Patrick protests, but he’s easy to overrule because he can’t stop laughing. It’s like cute, dorky, ridiculous Pete was put on this earth to make him happy. Put on this earth a few years early, maybe, but the promise of a whole weekend ahead of them—his mom has granted him permission to spend the weekend at the Trohman’s, which is basically code for Pete’s these days—and the afterglow of the not-technically-penetrative-sex from this morning’s shower has Patrick feeling good, feeling positive, feeling bulletproof. What’s five years between friends? By the time Patrick’s twenty, it’ll seem like no big deal. God, but Patrick wants to be just exactly right _here_ when he’s twenty, he thinks, leaning forward and kissing the secret spot he’s claimed for himself just behind Pete’s ear.

They are standing in the checkout line and Pete is narrating tabloid headlines to Patrick in a variety of amusing voices and everything could not be more ideal, when all of a sudden Pete freezes like he’s in a UFO tractor beam and all the blood drains out of his face. Patrick immediately starts scanning the store for cops; Pete tried to shove him behind a dumpster on their walk to the store because he saw a Macy’s security guard. All Patrick sees, though, is the very exasperated cashier, the very unpleasant couponer in line ahead of them who is exasperating the cashier, and the approaching manager who is wearing a green Mariano’s vest and looking dead inside.

Pete starts trying to hide behind Patrick without seeming like he’s hiding behind Patrick. He is talking very fast in a low, hard to make out voice. Patrick has no idea if Pete’s talking to him, talking to himself, or pleading with some very menacing nightmare creature that only Pete can see.

Patrick discerns the words, “Okay I appreciate that I definitely should’ve told you but I didn’t know what we were doing exactly and I mean I did sort of tell you and—” before the manager arrives at the register, busts through Pete’s Patrick disguise with one cutting look, and says, “Let me guess, Wentz, your phone mysteriously broke again.”

“Would you believe I lost it?” asks Pete sheepishly. He’s still holding Patrick in front of him like a human shield. Patrick knows for a fact Pete’s phone is not lost—knows where Pete’s phone is at this exact moment, actually, it’s in his back left pants pocket and Patrick has been amusing himself by trying to steal it, entirely because he likes having an excuse to grab Pete’s ass in public—so he’s a little confused by what Pete’s saying and the tone he’s saying it in.

“Yeah, well, I hope you lost my number with it,” sneers the manager. He turns to the couponer, who now looks more intrigued than rampant.

Patrick is definitely not okay with whatever is happening right now, and gives the guy a much closer look. He’s a little taller than Patrick, which immediately puts Patrick on the defensive. He is also, Patrick regretfully acknowledges, undeniably attractive. Black hair with pink forelock gelled back out of his face, smudges of last night’s eyeliner giving his light green-brown eyes an alluring smoky quality. A big square jaw, long smooth cheekbones, a heavy brow and dark lashes. Really unfairly pink lips, mouth shaped exactly like how you learn to draw a mouth—in other words, basically perfect. This guy is _definitely_ not sixteen. He is _definitely_ Pete’s type. He would _definitely_ not look this pissed off if he hadn’t had some kind of romantic interlude with Pete at some point. Patrick is all too aware of how upsetting those can be.

Patrick’s hands have formed into fists of their own accord. _Mikey W_ is embroidered onto the pocket of this guy’s vest. Patrick is trying to unclench his fists but kind of feels like he’d rather punch something, up to and including _Mikey W_.

“Mikey, c’mon,” Pete says mincingly. Patrick steps abruptly to the side. Whatever is happening here, he is NOT going to be part of it.

“If you don’t mind, actually, I have a fucking job to do right now. Not every damn thing is about you and what you want—shocking, I know,” Mikey spits.

The couponer looks from cringing Pete to fuming Mikey with great interest. “Actually,” she says, “I wouldn’t mind seeing this play out. If you’d like to deal with him first.”

Mikey glowers up at Pete, who tries to skitter back behind Patrick. Patrick slams his back firmly against the rack of gum and cigarette lighters (which, ow), offering no shelter.

“Don’t worry, ma’am, I am completely, utterly finished with this asshole,” Mikey says, eyes not leaving Pete. “Your expired, non-combinable coupons are infinitely more worthy of my time.”

“Mikey, you’re my best friend,” says Pete. Patrick can see immediately this is a mistake. _Accept the brush-off, Pete. Escape, escape_ , he tries to signal Pete with his thoughts. But Pete, apparently, is not ready to abandon their cart full of chips. His foraging instincts are stronger than his will to survive.

“Ex-friend,” Mikey growls. “Better off as lovers, not the other way around. Yeah, I read your shitty break-up note until the paper was like, coming apart in my hands, and I answered your booty call _anyway_ because I’m a glutton for punishment, apparently, when the punishment is you, and then—and then I was actually stupid enough to be _surprised_ when you wouldn’t answer my calls or texts. And then my fucking brother tells me you take not one but _two_ guys home from your show, and for some reason I try to call you again, and—and you can’t even be bothered to fuck me up in person, Pete, and that’s the worst of it. Forget looking me in the eye, you won’t even do it over the _phone_ , you’re always trashing me in writing or in silence, and it’s—it’s very one-sided, and it’s a very shitty way to treat someone, and I am just extremely fucking _done_ with you, Pete Wentz.”

The couponer does a slow clap. “You tell him, hon,” she says encouragingly. Patrick’s scrambled brains are shattered across half the store. He doesn’t know what to think or feel or do.

This is irrelevant, apparently—Patrick is irrelevant—Pete only has eyes for Mikey, big sad heartbreak eyes. When the hell was this booty call, is what Patrick wants to know. Was Pete in love with this guy. For how long, how long ago. When Pete trashes Patrick will he have the courage to do it in person or should Patrick start bracing for a note.

“Okay, a lot—a _lot_ of that is factual,” Pete’s saying. Patrick feels a little bit like he might cry. “But you’re not being very fair. I have—I mean, I had stuff going on too.”

Mikey smiles sweetly at the couponer. “If you’ll excuse me for just one more moment, ma’am,” he says, “it appears I’m not _quite_ done after all.”

“Let him have it,” says the couponer savagely. No wonder the cashier looks so battered. This woman is vicious.

Mikey turns again, but this time it’s not Pete he glares at, it’s Patrick. Patrick! He has no idea what he’s done to deserve this but he’d very much like to not be involved. A lot of things Patrick has done with Pete are a bad idea, Patrick knows that, but he didn’t know going to a grocery store was going to be one of them.

“Let me tell you about unfair,” Mikey says, eyes boring into Patrick even though he’s plainly talking to Pete. He’s looking at Patrick like he’s part of the landscape, a particularly vile and despicable _thing_ , not like he’s a person. His eyes sweep up and down in a very discomfiting way. Patrick does not care for this at all. “ _Unfair_ is you bringing your little jailbait boyfriend into my store. _Unfair_ is only calling me when you’re grey or when you’re horny. _Unfair_ is the entire way you interact with people, the way you pick us up and put us down like we’re set pieces in your fucking drama, like we have no lives or thoughts of our own, like we don’t exist when you’re not looking at us. The way you play with us for a while, until we’re dirty and broken, and then you don’t want us anymore because we remind you too much of yourself. So you turn away and shut us out and go find somebody shiny and new, and in the meantime, we’re fucking wrecked, we’re ruined, we’re broken, and we don’t want anyone but you! How the fuck is _that_ for _unfair_.” Mikey finally locks eyes with Patrick, who is a little out of breath and shaky from the experience of being yelled at in a grocery store, even if the words are really meant for Pete.

“Get the fuck out while you can,” Mikey says to Patrick, deadly serious, not even blinking. “Go back to high school. It’s a fucking Friday afternoon, I’d bet anything you’ve got somewhere else you’re supposed to be. Go there, stay there, lock the door behind you. This _fucking_ guy is going to use you until you’re used up.”


	15. Chapter 15

Pete Wentz is not a perfect person. He’s working on it, okay? But today, right now, this is where he’s at. Fucked up, deeply flawed, and not about to let anyone, _anyone_ talk to his Patrick like that.

“That’s fucking enough!” Pete is as surprised as anyone that his perfectly reasonable speaking voice is coming out like a belligerent shout, but he’s not going to back down or put his belly up or diffuse the situation so he can run away, not this time. This time he’s gonna fuck shit up. Mikey wants a supermarket throwdown? He wants to humiliate Pete in front of an audience? Fine. Pete is more than happy to follow his lead.

Pete stomps forward, shoves the couponer’s overloaded cart out of his way (the couponer leaps back, gasping, like Pete has shoved an actual human infant and not a cart full of Windex and Kraft), and digs his finger into Mikey’s chest like a threat. _I’m willing to lay hands on you,_ the finger says. _You want to escalate, let’s fucking escalate_.

Pete actually doesn’t usually yell back. He’s the screaming guy in his band, he’s the too-intense dude in any given room, he’s a zoo animal in a pet store that no one is really prepared to care for, he’s Alice in Wonderland growing too big to interact with anything without damaging it, he’s the idiot who never knows when or how to stop talking—he’s all of that and more, but actually, in his real life, he doesn’t yell that much. Or ever. He’s certainly never raised his voice to Mikey before. Mikey’s face shows it.

“You are right about me, okay? Every ugly word out of all the shit you could possibly say about me is _true_. I am the lord of trash and the baron of scum. I _agree_ with you. I was a coward when I dumped you in a poem and I was an asshole when I called you for sex and ignored you afterwards.” Pete is yelling, yelling insults at himself, digging his finger into Mikey’s chest. Mikey is quailing. Pete’s loud, self-directed aggression is very intimidating to his enemies.

“Both times,” Mikey adds. His voice is timid, abashed.

“Yes. Both times. Even more the second time.” Pete glances back at Patrick, whose cheeks are two spots of fury in an ashen angry face. Pete can feel everything good and soft and loving they’ve shared today turning to glass, preparing to shatter. He talks faster, trying to outrun it. “My reasons were… not good. I’m sorry I disrespected you and I’m sorry our friendship, relationship, whatever ended so badly.”

“Whatever?” repeats the coupon lady. Everyone ignores her.

“I will be—I always am—the first to admit I’m an asshole. But you don’t get to say _shit_ to him because _I’m_ a jerk.” Pete’s voice is getting louder again. He doesn’t stop him. He never does.

“You don’t know _anything_ about this kid and you don’t get to make threats or snide comments or dire fucking prophecies, you don’t even get to _look_ at him if he doesn’t want you to, and you _definitely_ fucking don’t get to treat him like he’s—like he’s _spoiled_ somehow, just because he fucking happens to be at a grocery store with the Scumbaron Supreme!”

Pete’s voice, when he gets going, really carries. Probably a stage performer thing. They’ve drawn a larger audience than just coupon lady by now. One man is covering his child’s ears, looking scandalized. Someone somewhere is applauding. Mikey has the grace to look embarrassed—Pete’s always liked him—but Pete’s not looking at any of them, Pete’s looking at Patrick. Patrick looks very much like he’s trying not to smile. Their soft moments are soft again, without edges.

Pete exhales, lets his finger drop. “Okay?” he says in a normal voice.

Mikey doesn’t look happy about it, exactly, but he looks like maybe he got something off his chest that he didn’t need to be carrying around anymore, and that has some worth.

“Okay,” Mikey says. “As long as we’re clear that you’re an asshole.”

Pete holds his hands up, backing away. “Totally.”

Mikey glances sideways at Patrick. “Uh, sorry,” he says. “I meant it and it was true and, like, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to run the other way screaming, but it wasn’t cool for me to bring you into this. For all I know you just have the misfortune of being friends with this dick and all you wanted was some chips. Like a lot of chips. So… I’m sorry.”

Pete thinks this is a pretty solid apology. Pete would be totally satisfied with it, personally. But it is Patrick’s reaction that matters. The eyes of the entire Mariano’s are on him.

Patrick starts to blush from all the attention, which is Pete’s favorite thing in the world. He’d bottle it if he could. Surprising them all—Pete actually hears a few gasps—Patrick reaches out and grabs Pete’s hand.

“Do you only like me because I’m shiny and new?” he asks Pete.

Pete, personally, would rather not have this conversation _exactly_ right now and in this specific location, but he can see how he’s set a precedent, and he really has no choice but to answer.

“Of course not. I would like you if you were mildewed and decrepit.” It is easy to sound utterly sincere when you are utterly sincere.

“Because, uh, they don’t come much shinier or newer than—”

“ _You_ said _you were twenty-five_ ,” Pete interrupts in a hiss that he hopes, _he hopes_ , the rest of the store can’t hear. “ _So don’t even._ ”

Patrick laughs, a big, goofy laugh that fills the front of the store. Sound really carries in here. Pete thinks it would be a good place to do a show. Mikey probably wouldn’t agree to that, though.

“And what happens if I end up dirty and broken?”

That one’s easy. Reverently, like he’s taking communion, Pete leans forward and kisses Patrick’s forehead. “I clean you up. I fix you.”

“Okay then. My heart’s yours for the trashing.” Patrick smiles at him beatifically. Pete’s own heart has not felt so light for days.

“See, now we’re getting back into unfair,” Mikey interjects crabbily. “There are like 30 grocery stores in your neighborhood, man. This isn’t even the closest one. You walked past, like, at least three groceries on your way here.”

Pete ducks his head to hide his grin. He squeezes Patrick’s hand once, then drops it. “My bad,” Pete says. Even his speaking voice sounds like laughter right now, he’s so happy. “We’ll go be cute at Jewel-Osco.”

“Ugh,” Mikey says. He punches his override into the register and tells the cashier, “Let her use whatever coupons she wants, I don’t care. We’ve all suffered enough.”

Mikey exits stage right, shaking his head and scowling. The scene breaks up, the audience dissipates. The gleeful couponer produces a whole other sheaf of coupons from her pocketbook, now that Mikey’s blessed it.

Ten tedious minutes later they’re back on the freezing city streets, loaded down with shopping bags, and the whole day seems illuminated, like they can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. (Even, maybe, two guys who actually know how to make carnitas.)

“Thanks for sticking up for me in there,” Patrick says after they’ve walked a few blocks in companionable silence.

“I promise to, at the very least, rescue you from situations of my own creation,” Pete vows solemnly. Even though he doesn’t have the best track record with vows, he feels good about this one. “I meant it,” Pete adds after a beat, his voice touched by wonderment. “I knew you were special the first minute I saw you, ‘Trick. But I never imagined… all this.”

“Am I more than you bargained for yet?” Patrick teases. The warmth and happiness in this kid’s voice, Pete thinks, could sustain him for weeks. Years.

“You’ve been that from the first minute too,” Pete laughs.

“There is one thing I’m wondering…”

“Ask me anything.”

“Who the _hell_ is Mikey W. and what are the exact situational details of these so-called booty calls?”

It turns out to be kind of a long walk home.

 

 

Pete owns, like, less than half the pots and pans required to transmute raw pork into carnitas—honestly they’d be lucky if he had the proper culinary equipment to prepare microwave nachos—but they manage, through much hilarity, improvisation, and a truly heroic mess, to turn out a nice spread, all of which can be eaten on chips, which Patrick has started calling “nature’s perfect utensil.”

After they eat until they can’t move, Pete puts on a movie that they half watch, half make out through. Pete gets Patrick to sing for him again and it’s just as good as the first time, better even. Pete comes up with the most embarrassing song requests he can think of, including the Lion King song and the Divinyls, and Patrick, his Patrick, knocks them all out of the park. Somehow he convinces Patrick to do the Thriller dance, and Pete laughs so hard Patrick punches him, and they end up wrestling around Pete’s apartment and the wrestling turns into extremely thorough kissing, and then there’s hands and belts and friction, and then they’re both such a mess Pete convinces Patrick it’s a good idea to take a bath, and then once they’ve totally flooded Pete’s bathroom splashing and roughhousing and fooling around some more, they lay on Pete’s futon wrapped in towels and blankets and stare up at the glow in the dark stars Pete has on his ceiling. It is, without contest, the best day of Pete’s life.

Patrick is nearly asleep on Pete’s chest, judging by his breathing, before Patrick is brave enough to ask, “Um, Patrick? So you may have noticed today that some of my relationships are… messy and ill-defined, and usually that doesn’t work out super well, and I guess… I’m tired of thinking of whatever this is as ‘whatever this is,’ so…”

“Was there a question in there somewhere?” Patrick asks sleepily. He doesn’t even open his eyes. He is the most peaceful, beautiful golden creature Pete has ever laid eyes on. Forget the stars; it’s Patrick who’s glowing.

“You don’t have to answer,” Pete hurries on, terrified all of a sudden he’ll ruin it by asking. He’d be grateful for a lifetime of ‘whatever’ and ‘what if,’ if it was with Patrick. He’d move permanently into liminal space without hesitation, if it was with Patrick.

“You didn’t _ask_ anything!” Patrick protests.

This is too big for the words Pete knows. Nothing fits it. For once, he doesn’t have anything to say.

Patrick lifts his head and looks blearily at Pete, halfway between annoyance and amusement. “Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz,” Patrick begins solemnly. “Will you make me the happiest man on this third planet from the sun and… be my date for prom?” Patrick barely gets the last word out before he falls down cackling.

“You’re hilarious,” Pete says dryly. Really he’s glad Patrick eased the moment, made it into a joke. He doesn’t know how to say what Patrick means to him, doesn’t know how to ask… It’s all so impossible. Pete sees, now, that the age difference poses a bigger problem than consent laws and criminal sexual charges.

The problem is: they can’t live like this. Stolen weekends, sneaking around, never knowing how long it will be til they’ll see each other or even talk again, always in fear of being found out… God, Pete’s timing is bad. If he’d met Patrick just a few years from now. He doesn’t want to imagine what they might have had.

Because Pete knows Patrick can’t stay. Pete can’t keep him. Pete can’t even _ask_ him to stay.

It’s better it’s a light moment. One last laugh in a day full of laughter. “You’ll rue those words when I show up in a limousine and a powder blue tuxedo,” Pete threatens lovingly, smoothing Patrick’s hair, feeling the slow, warm weight of sleep settle through his dear body.

It is a long time yet before sleep comes for Pete.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys continue to be amazing. Thank you for reading!


	16. Chapter 16

Patrick doesn’t quite fit into the shape of his everyday life, after the weekend he lives with Pete. It’s like every time he gets to be with Pete, another layer of him is stripped away; he gets a little more raw, a little more the person he’s meant to be, a little closer to the person he is at his heart.

It sounds crazy, Patrick will be the first to admit it sounds crazy, but he thinks Pete Sexual Predator? Wentz might be _good_ for him.

As a sort of cosmic punishment, maybe, for a weekend spent too close to the sun, Patrick’s midterm schedule and Pete’s FootLocker and band practice schedules conspire to keep Patrick in the suburbs and Pete in the city for the whole of the week. Then Pete’s got a show in Wisconsin, of all places, over the weekend, and Pete seems weird about the idea of Patrick tagging along even though he’s the one who suggests it, and Patrick would kind of like to see Joe anyway—and basically life is cruel torture and Patrick misses Pete with a hugeness that seems frightening—he’s pretty sure Pete, alleyway stranger extraordinaire, was not supposed to become this important to him—and his thumbs are sore from texting smut, from flipping through the precious few dirty pictures Pete has let him have. Patrick is thinking, feeling, living entirely in sexually charged run-ons.

Patrick barely hears from Pete all day Saturday. He’s spending the day with Joe and he knows Pete’s in Wisconsin with one of his many bands, so he tries not to think about it. He tries not to make it a thing. By Saturday night he’s so preoccupied by staring at his lifeless phone that Joe steals it from him and chucks it up somewhere inside the drop ceiling. The next fifteen minutes they spend trying to kill each other are pretty distracting, at least.

When Joe breaks out a bottle of rum he got a friend’s older sister to buy for him—there is really, truly, _deeply_ not much else to do in the suburbs, not unless you’re super into long walks through the corn—Patrick does not even hesitate. Patrick very much wants a drink. He bets Pete’s drunk right now. He bets Pete’s—he doesn’t want to think about what Pete’s, actually. Rum is bitter and sharp and spiced and sweet. It hits him in the back of the throat with coughing force. This is extremely preferable to coming up with scenarios for _what Pete’s_.

Anyway, long story short, Patrick breaks two ceiling panels when he tries to climb into it, but he gets his phone back, which is the important thing. He’s sure Joe’s parents will agree. Joe helps him draft alluring texts to Pete, neither of them able to keep a straight face. Joe keeps suggesting paddles. Patrick suspects Joe’s got a thing. At some point, while Joe is trying suicidally to play Dance, Dance, Revolution, Patrick makes his very first drunk dial.

“You have a show tonight,” Patrick informs Pete’s voicemail. “You are prolly either playing that show or at an afterparty for that show or you’re with someone else, trying to get into their pants. Yes I know about your reputation. Pete—Pete. Listen. I hope you’re not in someone else’s pants. We could have a great afterparty right here, in my pants. I think I’m in love with you. Haven’t said _that_ before! Wow. To anyone. But I think I am. I hope—I mean it would be cool if you were too. You’re a lot older than me. You’ve got cooler options. I’m sorry I wore those dumb knee socks, I don’t think it was as funny as you thought it was. I’ll be like Sandy in _Grease_. I’ll get cooler. You’ll see.

“Talking about _Grease_ isn’t the pinnacle of cool, is it. Fuck. Megan’s always watching it. It’s like a Girl Scout thing. I don’t know. I like the songs. And the dancing. _The point is,_ I wouldn’t even know where to start, loving anyone but you. I don’t want to. You’re the only person I know how to be with. To be for. Goodnight, Pete. Oh! I almost forgot! Send more nudes, I only have like three. That’s cold, man. Anyway. That’s all. I miss you. Come rescue me from the suburbs and let’s drive off into the sunset together. Goodnight.”

In the morning, Patrick doesn’t remember a word of it. The text messages—oh, god the text messages—in his Sent box are embarrassing enough that when Pete texts him _hey let’s talk about what u said last nite, baby boy_ , Patrick sends back a panicky hungover _WE DEFINITELY DON’T HAVE TO I’M SORRY I WAS DRUNK I DIDN’T MEAN ANY OF IT, ESPECIALLY THE THING ABOUT SPANKING_.

When Pete doesn’t reply, Patrick is relieved. He deletes the texts Joe helped him compose from his phone, the next best thing to burning them, and gets busy forgetting they were ever sent. He never checks his outgoing calls.

 

 

Imagine Patrick’s surprise on Monday night when Pete shows up for dinner with his parents.

There is no warning, or nothing that Patrick considers warning. Two, maybe there hours of nonstop air raid sirens—now _that_ would have appropriately warned him of the enormity of the oncoming cataclysm. Instead, he gets this text from Pete, who’s been weirdly quiet all day (Patrick figures he’s been sleeping off a rock star weekend): _Hey what if I met ur parents_

Patrick has half a heart attack just imagining it. He’s in the process of typing _lmao no_ when the second message comes. The second message reads: _2nite_

The third message reads: _like, now_

Patrick’s scream of horror is swallowed up by the earth-shattering toll of the doorbell. Patrick is running, racing headlong down the stairs in the specific manner his mother has repeatedly assured him will result in a broken neck. His sock foot slides out from under him and he wipes out, landing on the third stair on his ass, too late, too late. The impact knocks the breath out of him, which is the only reason he doesn’t emit a bloodcurdling shriek as his mother, _his fucking mother_ , swings open the door in slow-motion. Lightning flashes, illuminating Pete’s dread silhouette in the doorway. Patrick’s life is basically a modern-day dramatization of Frankenstein. This is the way he will tell the story.

“Mrs. Stumph? Hi, I’m Pete.” These are the last words Patrick will ever hear spoken aloud, because he is definitely going to die of this situation. He is practically already dead.

Patrick’s mom, regrettably, does not turn Pete away outright. Several shades of surprise chase across her face before she collects herself enough to shake Pete’s outstretched hand. “What a surprise,” she says, in a voice that does not commit to whether said surprise is a pleasant one. Understatement of the fucking millennium. “Patrick didn’t say you were coming! I have to say, I didn’t expect I’d ever get to meet you. In person, that is. After…”

Pete grins, that adorable stupid grin. Only Pete Wentz would have the _audacity_ to grin at this moment. Patrick can see even his mom is immediately charmed by it. Is it a universal effect, or a weakness in the Stumph line? Honestly Patrick can’t imagine anyone not being charmed by Pete. Pete is dressed up—black skinny jeans, leather dress shoes instead of his usual brightly colored sneakers, grey vest buttoned over a band t-shirt. He’s wearing what Patrick would call ‘daytime company eyeliner,’ meaning that there are just a few understated strokes darkening his top and bottom lids. He has gelled his hair up so it doesn’t flop into his eyes, which Patrick briefly mourns. He’s wearing a silver necklace and a black wristband, and it’s the first time Patrick’s seen him without a hoodie on; instead he’s wearing a big, olive drab military coat with a fur hood. Unzipped, flopping open: it would spoil his boyish, Never-Neverland charm if he acted like he could feel the cold, if he took care of himself properly.

Patrick appreciates the tightness of Pete’s t-shirt, he really does. He just doesn’t appreciate that the t-shirt and mouthwatering torso it hugs so nicely are currently on his front stoop, talking to his _mom_. This is why you don’t give strangers your home address. This is the exact scenario that engendered that rule in the first place.

“Actually, it’s a surprise for him too,” Pete’s saying. “Is he home?”

Patrick fights an irrational urge to flee back upstairs and somehow hide himself—he could go on the roof maybe, or put on an especially good disguise—and evade this whole fucking situation until it resolves itself. He realizes this would leave Pete alone with his mom, though, and actually death _would_ be better than that, so Patrick does what he must. Patrick courageously strides out to meet his destiny.

“I think Pete was just leaving!” he says much too loudly, like really _so_ much louder than anyone else is talking, bursting onto the scene frantically. He uses his momentum to grab onto the front door, skid around his mother (there’s a win for socks!), and slam the door shut with him and Pete on the outside of it.

He’s standing there looking at Pete for the first time in over a week, and he can’t even be annoyed properly, all he can do is grin up at Pete giddily. Pete grins right back at him, a mirror for his own happiness.

“ _Hey_ ,” Patrick says at last. All words are inadequate.

“Hey,” Pete says back.

Then they’re kissing, and it’s hard to care Patrick’s mom is on the other side of the door when Pete’s tongue is on the other side of Patrick’s lips, and Patrick crushes himself against Pete for warmth, for love, for his very fucking survival. He winds his arms around Pete’s waist inside Pete’s coat, wishes he could slip into Pete’s skin as easily as Pete’s jacket. Patrick kisses Pete like he’s been starving for it, like he’s been lost without it. He kisses hard into Pete’s mouth, as if to say _I’d devour you if I could_. Pete cannot match his intensity, though he tries to keep up, and eventually Pete breaks the kiss, out of breath, laughing.

“Jesus, Patrick, are you at least going to invite me upstairs, or are you going to cannibalize me right on your doorstep?” His words are soft, his smile suggesting Patrick is the golden sun, that Patrick invented, sculpted, and then hung the planets and the stars. Pete presses his lips to Patrick’s forehead, which seems to be one of his favorite spots, and holds them there for a long, sweet moment. “You are the most beautiful thing,” Pete whispers, so softly Patrick can barely hear him. Their breath fogs the night air, words turning to wisps of smoke, floating away.

Then Patrick’s mom starts flicking the porch lights on and off, and that pretty much kills the moment.

“I wanted to do this honorably,” Pete announces, grabbing one of Patrick’s cold hands in his own. “Introduce myself to your parents, state my intentions, the whole bit.”

“Your _intentions_ …?” Patrick repeats.

Pete flashes a grin at that, the quick grin that remakes his whole face into crinkles, his wide mouth and eyes into radiating triangles of real, instant pleasure and warmth. “Okay, not _all_ of my intentions,” he admits. “And then, after all that, if you still… after that I want to talk about what you said the other night.”

Patrick turns purple. Patrick chokes on his own tongue. “I ASKED YOU TO FORGET ABOUT THE SPANKING THING,” he sputters, just as his mom gives up on the porch lights and opens the front door.

 

 

So there’s Pete Wentz, sitting at the dining table with his parents and his little sister. Thank god Kevin’s at college and his grandparents are in Florida, because Patrick really doesn’t think he can handle much more than this. Somehow Patrick is supposed to be calmly eating stir fry like everyone else. Patrick thinks they have all lost their damn minds.

Patrick’s mom keeps shooting Pete excited looks, like she can’t believe how cool and handsome he is or that he’s really here for her most awkward child, like she’s going to try to take a picture for the Patrick’s First Boyfriend spread in her fucking scrapbook. Patrick’s dad is remarking mildly, “So Patrick hasn’t told me much about you, Pete.”

Pete _grins_ at Patrick’s dad, _grins_ at him like it’s all a big fucking joke. “Oh, um, well, I’m a musician,” Pete says. “I play in about four bands right now; at least one and a half are getting serious. Other than that—I am in band practice, like, more than I sleep—I have this really glamorous job at FootLocker.”

Patrick’s parents keep waiting. Pete’s obnoxious confidence wavers for the first time. He obviously has no idea what they want him to say next; he obviously thought the occupational history he provided was complete. Patrick tries desperately to develop telepathy and tell Pete with his mind: _school school SCHOOL you’re supposed to be in SCHOOL I am sixteen years old you need to be in school!_

Finally Patrick’s mom just asks. “And school, dear? Do you go to South with Patrick?”

The trap is sprung. Pete is definitely not smiling now. He’s sending Patrick these tiny looks like he’s about to say something stupid and he hopes Patrick won’t be mad. Desperate to create a diversion, Patrick knocks over Megan’s milk. Only Megan cares.

“Welllllllllll,” Pete drags out the word. He’s still shooting Patrick these _forgive me Patrick for what I must do_ looks. Patrick frowns as hard as he can. “I went to North Country prep so I could play on their soccer team. All-star, you know.” Patrick assumes this is an elaborate lie. He’s never heard a word of it and doesn’t like where it’s heading (although he does like the image of Pete in a soccer uniform). “Then I got a scholarship for that, so I went to DePaul for a while. Didn’t finish, though. Like I said, some of my bands are kind of serious.”

Every member of the Stumph family is staring at Pete now. They all have slightly open mouths and looks of disbelief on their faces. Pete is outlining a whole new horror for them, of what disappointments they might expect with a talented musical son. And probably like Rocky Horror-style scenes of debauchery that an _older man wearing eyeliner_ might have planned for Patrick. Patrick is going to wring Pete’s neck himself, when he’s forty-five and finally allowed near enough to touch Pete again.

“As in DePaul the _college_?” Patrick’s mom finally asks. Patrick’s whole world is crumbling down around him. He is living an actual nightmare. Really—he woke in a sweat last night from a dream so similar to the _currently unfolding situation_ it might have been prophetic. Why, _why_ would Pete craft a cover story that is so… incriminating? Like, what is this story even _covering_? Not their age difference, that’s for sure.

Suddenly, Patrick has a horrible thought. Surely Pete would not be so stupid to be telling Patrick’s parents the truth… right? That could not have been his _plan_. Come here, fill his plate with stir fry, conversationally alert Patrick’s parents he’s so ridiculously old that they have no choice but to forbid Patrick from ever seeing him again and then… what? Mourn tastefully at Patrick’s funeral and get back together with Mikey?

“Yeah,” says Pete casually, confirming all of Patrick’s worst fears. “Just, um, I mean, like for a limited time though. Poly Sci couldn’t compete with rock’n’roll.” Pete’s trying for a laugh, here, but most of the people at the table right now seem to want to hit him. Except Megan—based on the savage kicks of Patrick’s shins under the table, she’s still stuck on the milk thing.

“How old did you say you were, Pete?” Patrick’s mom is sounding a little faint. She has her martyr look on, as in, how much am I possibly expected to bear, O Lord, isn’t it enough that my son likes boys, does he have to also like _men_.

“I’ll be 19 in June.”

Patrick could kiss Pete on the mouth. (Not that that would deescalate the situation.) If he hadn’t gone and said the name of a fucking university, maybe no one would have ever asked the age question; but it may have been inevitable, even if they’d kept the conversation to the merits of broccoli. Pete doesn’t look very… Patrick’s age. Still, Patrick can’t quite breathe, and the jury’s still out on whether Pete can pass for 18, and then the _second_ jury will have to reach a decision on the upper age limit of who Patrick’s allowed to date, so—they  aren’t out of the woods yet.

This whole nightmare scenario could have been totally avoided, Patrick thinks balefully in Pete’s direction, if a certain individual had never showed up on the doorstep in the first place.

But like Fox Mulder, Patrick’s parents want to believe. The lie lands. “Well that’s quite a bit older than our Patrick,” his mother starts in.

“I’m almost 17, Mom, god,” Patrick can’t stop himself from saying. “I’m allowed to have friends who are eighteen.”

“Friends?” Megan’s most unwelcome voice joins the assault. “Weren’t you just like kissing on the front steps?”

Patrick wonders how long it would take him to saw open his arteries with his table knife. Too long, probably. Of all nights not have meat knives on the table—!

“Megan, eat your dinner,” Patrick’s dad says, exactly like an angel from god. Patrick wonders if he’s trying extra hard not to seem prejudiced, after Patrick’s accusation a few weeks ago.

Pete meets Patrick’s eyes across the melee and bloodshed and gives him a small, tight smile. Pete almost looks… sad, if you know where to look. If you look for, and can’t find, the glow that usually lives in his eyes.

“Friends,” Pete says. Now that the word’s in Pete’s mouth, Patrick can feel the sting too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kids, we are entering the home stretch. I can't wait.
> 
> In a deeply tragic turn of events, I go back to work tomorrow, which means I can no longer spend all day watching Youngblood and writing fanfic and crying about band lyrics. I don't know why bandom scholar isn't an accepted, salaried occupation, really I don't. I plan to keep updating daily, though. Thank you for all the encouragement!


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All I have for you today is pain, cats and kittens.

 

Somehow Pete survives the meal. There are some truly touch and go moments. Probably Pete should have lied more; god knows he’s an accomplished liar. But he came here tonight for an honest reason and he wants to proceed honestly. And yes, he also remembers how the last time Patrick gave his life history he was a high school drop-out. He at least wants to be credited as a college drop-out, even if he can’t cop to how close he actually got to his degree.

Pete came here tonight because Patrick Stumph told him, _I think I’m in love with you._ Patrick Stumph told him, _I didn’t mean any of it_. Pete could live and die in the space between those two messages. There’s room for a whole life there. That’s why Pete came here tonight: to find out which message was true. And to see if—if Patrick loving him could even work out. Like, if he could meet Patrick’s parents, be at least mostly honest, and have things play out like a normal, legal relationship. To see what it would be like if he could date Patrick properly, if he could ask Patrick to be his boyfriend. If there was any way Pete Wentz could fit into the amazing life already unfolding here without fucking it straight to hell.

He doesn’t want to be a bull in the china shop of Patrick’s life. He came here tonight—to see _if_ Patrick loved him, _if_ they had shot.

He knows he should have done this with Patrick’s permission. He also knows Patrick would have said no. And Pete just—Pete just has to know. Can he fit here. Can he love Patrick without ruining him. Is it true that you’re what you love, not who loves you. Can Pete be good. How careful does Pete have to be about who Patrick loves.

He’s trying to be someone else. He already knows he can’t be someone else. But for Patrick he will fucking try.

With notable reluctance, Patrick’s parents excuse them before dessert. “Want to see my room?” Patrick asks him.

“Door _open_ , Patrick!” Mrs. Stumph calls as Patrick drags Pete by the wrist up the stairs.

Then they’re alone in Patrick’s bedroom—and just that one sentence, wow, talk about fantasies—and even though Pete came to discuss serious things that can’t wait, he also can’t stop himself from buzzing around the room, looking at and touching _everything_. He’s standing in the blast center of a Patrick Stumph hand grenade. Star Wars toys; old music posters that look like they belong to someone’s mom in these thin black frames so they don’t get _damaged_ ; a clutter of guitar picks, capos, school papers, and soda cans on his desk; a pile of hats and wristbands and jelly bracelets (Pete immediately puts one on) on top of a dresser child-Patrick had covered in baby animal stickers; a twin bed with Ghostbusters sheets; a bookcase with shelves double-stacked with paperback books, comics, and VHS tapes; his drum kit and two guitars crammed in a corner; a huge clunky stereo with a big 50-CD changer wheel in it; towers of jewel cases and little tangles of laundry occupying pretty much every other surface.

There’s really nowhere to sit—a ladder to the heavens of t-shirts balances on Patrick’s desk chair, the only seat in the room—so Pete throws himself on the narrow bed and wraps his arms around a fantastically Patrick-smelling pillow. There is a notebook open on Patrick’s nightstand with chord progressions and snippets of lyrics scribbled in it. Being in here is like being in Patrick’s brain. It’s wonderful.

“I’m never leaving,” Pete announces. He hugs the pillow tighter so it releases more Patrick-smell. “This is, like, my personal Disneyland. Patrickland: the happiest place on earth.”

This makes Patrick duck his head and blush, which only makes Pete want to keep saying things like that forever. The word ‘forever’ reminds him, though, of the stupid, stupid thing he came here to do tonight. Suddenly he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want anything to change. Maybe he can just hang out in Patrick’s bedroom and soak up his wholesome childhood instead. Hell, maybe they can have a sleepover. Pete makes no promises about his ability to stay in his own sleeping bag.

Pete came here. He introduced himself to Patrick’s parents with the minimum possible amount of lying. And… and Patrick told them all, despite their personal witnessing of the contrary, that Pete was just his friend. Maybe Pete should follow his lead on that. Maybe Pete should back down. After all, being friends with Patrick Stumph is already far and away so much more than he deserves, more than he thought he’d ever get. Pete kinda thought his life peaked at pizza, that that was the ultimate, and he made his peace with that. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Chicago pizza.

But Patrick. Pete never could have anticipated Patrick. Pete would think he dreamed this kid to life, except his dreams are never that good. His particular brain could never come up with something as beautiful, as radiant, as this kid.

But Pete Wentz wouldn’t be Pete Wentz if he could tone it down. No matter how much he wants to preserve this moment, the words come out. “I know I’m not supposed to ask you about Saturday,” he says, reckless as a drunk rhinoceros, like he just can’t help what he crushes, spoils, or shatters, “but I have to ask about Saturday. It felt like you… opened a door, in your message. But then you… closed it again.”

Pete is twisting Patrick’s pillowcase in his hands. He can’t look at Patrick except in three-second bursts. Patrick starts out looking embarrassed and ends looking angry.

“Like you’ve never sent me a weird drunk message! What about that time you wouldn’t shut up about dressing me as a sea captain? Did I give you shit about that? No I did not!” Patrick’s voice so quickly jumps from exasperation to anger. On any other topic, this would delight and amuse Pete to no end. Patrick’s quickness to anger is one of the things that make him so fun to tease. “I was just goofing around with Joe, okay? I don’t want to say it again! It was stupid. At the time we thought it was really funny. That’s it. Can we let it drop? God, I am going to make fun of you for _weeks_ the next time you say something drunk and ill-advised.”

Pete hopes it doesn’t show on his face, but he is fucking _wrecked_ right now. His heart is a car crash. He came here to—fuck, he doesn’t know, to make some kind of declaration. He sees now Patrick doesn’t want it. Patrick is a _kid_ , Pete has to stop forgetting that. He doesn’t need to be saddled with a fucked-up broken-down bloody-edged twenty-two year old lost boy. He doesn’t _want_ to be. Pete is a mess in a way that is not romantic but _annoying_.

Friends, Patrick said. They’re friends. When was the last time someone wanted even that much of Pete? He should do what Patrick says. He should forget what could be and just be grateful for what he’s got.

Grateful feels a lot like drowning with his eyes open right at this second, but he’s sure he’ll get better at it with practice.

“Okay,” Pete says. His voice sounds flat, even to him. He fixes his eyes just past Patrick’s head. He can’t bear to look at him right now. “Sorry.” He doubts he’s ever been sorrier. Pete kind of has a monopoly on apologies, so that’s saying something.

Silence stretches between them, thick and dreadful. No one knows what to say. Patrick, having no idea that Pete fucking _loves_ him, has been totally batshit in love with him for what feels like _centuries_ , has loved him since before he even knew there was such a thing as a Patrick, it feels like—Patrick is probably confused about the gaping hurt filling up the room. Pete feels bad about that (Pete feels bad about everything) so he tries to make it better.

Using the voice he imagines he would use if he was totally and completely fine and had not just taken a bullet to the heart, Pete asks casually, “So you’ve got spring break soon, right?” Patrick nods, still looking pissed. Pete keeps talking. “Chicago in March is, like, basically Cancun. Better, even. Total beach weather. And I have it on good authority that there’s gonna be a vacancy at the Wentz Resort. If you’d be interested.”

That’s Pete Wentz for you: gets his heart slammed back in a pulp and offers it out again, like anyone would want the ugly fucked thing. Tell Pete Wentz you just want to be friends, that the idea of loving him is actually on the level of _a joke_ , and not even a private joke but one you came up with with your best friend, and Pete Wentz will ask you to live with him for a week, because Pete Wentz was born without the instinct for self-preservation, because Pete Wentz doesn’t know when or how to stop. Pete Wentz always takes it too far, except when he doesn’t take it far enough, and he can’t even fucking tell the difference between the two.

Pete is hopeful and hangdog, waiting on Patrick’s reply. Patrick bites his lip, looks miserable, and turns away. He grabs a hat off his dresser and shoves it down over his eyes. Pete has learned this is how Patrick hides. He wishes Patrick wouldn’t hide from him. He wishes it made him love Patrick any less. This is the terminal amount of love. Pete’s not gonna survive it.

“Um, I guess I didn’t tell you. I’m actually going to Paris?” Patrick addresses this to his framed poster of Elvis Costello.

As a whole, nothing about the present situation came up _any_ of the times Pete imagined being in Patrick’s bedroom. And he ran, like, _numerous_ scenarios.

“With French Club,” Patrick is saying. He’s pacing now. “It’s gonna be really cool. Um, probably not as good as the Wentz Resort, but—”

“Don’t,” Pete interrupts. He’s surprised by his own tone, to the extent that any shit he does can surprise him anymore. He can’t sit still for a heartbeat longer. He jumps to his feet, sticks his hands deep in his pockets so he can keep his fingernails out of his arms. Restless, restless, buzzes his blood against his skin.

Patrick’s looking angry again. “Did I do something _wrong_?” Patrick asks. “Like, why did you even come here if you’re just going to act like—whatever the hell this is?”

If Pete had a dollar for every fucking time he’d heard that. Jesus. You’d think by now he’d have come up with an answer, but he’s pretty much figured on not figuring himself out.

He wishes he had a hood about now. Pete would like to take refuge in hiding his face, too. “You’re right,” he says. The words come out poisonous. He’s not in control. He’s so fucking tired of not being in control. “I should go.”

“Fine!” Patrick’s face so red, his eyes so watery. Pete has _got_ to get out of here before Patrick starts to cry. Before he _makes_ Patrick cry. “Go!”

Leaving is something Pete has a lot of experience with. He doesn’t hesitate. He goes.


	18. Chapter 18

“He’s just being such a dick right now,” Patrick is telling Joe in the high school locker room. He uses the corner of his stupid gym shirt to scrub a stupid tear off his stupid cheek. _This one_ , Patrick tells himself. _This is_ officially _the last tear I shed over Pete Wentz._

He already knows it’s not.

“I thought thing were going well,” Joe says. Joe is frowning like he’d kick Pete’s ass right now if Patrick asked him to. He’s also frowning like he’s confused. Joe is a very nuanced person. “I thought you were like, boyfriends now. After you told him you loved him and everything.”

Patrick, on his way to grabbing a tennis racket, stops in his tracks. The two people behind him collide. Patrick wheels around, out of line, and grabs Joe, like, _definitely_ too hard by the shoulders. “What are you talking about,” Patrick demands. He is the essence of calm. “I did not _say_ that. I remember _specifically_ not saying that because of how _uncool_ it would.”

Joe’s doing the ‘you’re so crazy my eyebrows are taking refuge in outer space’ thing he’s so good at. “Uh, no, you definitely said it. On Saturday? When you, you know, drunk dialed him?”

Patrick’s grip is now so tight it’s probably leaving bruises. “What _whated_ him? I drunk texted him, Joe. I am a gentleman of quality and I draw the line at drunk _texts_. That’s it.”

“That was definitely not it.”

“What are you _even saying right now_?” Patrick is increasingly shrill. And reasonable. He is being just like completely balanced and reasonable. “Are you saying _I called Pete?_ ”

“Ow, dude. Yes. You left him a long rambling message about how much you looooooved him. And _Grease_? You talked about _Grease_ a lot. Now let go of me, I want to get a court before we end up playing with freshmen.”

Patrick’s shock and subsequent horror slacken his hands. Joe breaks free, grabs two rackets, and steers Patrick to one of the last available tennis courts: facing off against two freshmen girls.

Patrick can barely see their opponents. Yesterday’s fight with Pete is replaying in his head, clarifying, clicking horribly into place.

“Pete’s not the dick,” Patrick whispers in horror. “ _I’m_ the dick.” It is at that moment that Patrick, definitely not paying attention, is fucking _brained_ by an incoming tennis ball.

 

 

Really, Patrick doesn’t mind the black eye or the head injury. He gets out of the rest of gym class and convinces the school nurse to let him use his phone to help him stay awake—she’s very adamant that he not fall asleep, in case he’s got a concussion. Patrick’s pretty sure the world is spinning and his stomach is cramping with nausea for a really different reason than a concussion.

The most important thing in the world is finding out what Pete would have said, if Patrick hadn’t yelled at him to forget it.

He spends like six straight minutes agonizing over his tiny, shitty Nokia phone, trying to figure out how to fix this in 160 characters. He can’t, he finally realizes. The moment in his bedroom when Pete Wentz may or may not have told Patrick he was in love with him—that moment’s over. He can’t fix it and it’s not coming back.

Life, though, is made of moments.

Patrick sets out to make a new one. He types, _Don’t leave fr Paris til Saturday night. can I see u friday?_

 

 

Patrick is going out of his mind. It is the beginning of _ninth period_ Bio and Pete still has not texted him back. Patrick has stopped himself from sending at least 33 anxious ‘do u hate me’ ‘r u dead’ ‘sorry sorry sorry im so in love w you’-type texts to fill this silence. He doesn’t know where they stand, after the train wreck yesterday. He’s treading lightly, trying to play it cool. Patrick’s not cool, though. He’s a mega dork and Pete’s silence is killing him.

_Finally_ , as the school day is drawing to a close and Patrick’s self-restraint with it, Patrick gets a response.

_pack snowpants_ , Pete’s text says, _& a swimsuit. i'll pick u up fri @ school, have u back Sat_.

Of all the possible messages Patrick prepared for, best-case and worst-case, this one… this one just straight did not come up.

At 10 cents a message, Patrick texts,

_ok_

_but_

_uhhhhhhhh...?_

All he gets back is a winky face. Based on this information, Patrick can’t even tell if he’s forgiven.

 

 

There are so many things Patrick wants to say when he finally sees Pete again that he doesn’t say any of them. Pete pulls up in a big old Jeep that looks a little… tetanusy and honks. Patrick, frozen, makes no move to get in. Pete rolls down his window and yells, “All aboard!” It’s the dumbest thing he could possibly say, which makes it easier for Patrick to breathe and move again.

Patrick goes around the back and throws his backpack in. He’s hoping Pete was kidding about the snowpants; they didn’t fit in his backpack and he didn’t want to tip his parents off that he was doing anything unusual. His backpack lands on top of two brightly-colored plastic sleds. Maybe Pete wasn’t kidding.

A weight has been settled in Patrick’s gut all day. He expected it to lift when he saw Pete, but it hasn’t. Things are not super all right between them. Patrick’s gut is feeling the pressure.

Patrick gets in the passenger seat and doesn’t say ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I meant it when I said I loved you’ or even ‘it’s good to see you.’ Patrick goes right for the important topic, the real heart of the matter, and says, “I didn’t know you had a car.”

“Ta-da,” says Pete. He smiles at Patrick but it doesn’t light up his face like it usually does. There’s no dazzle. Pete’s voice is ever-so-slightly off—uncertain of the appropriate tone. “It’s not just anyone I’d give up a city parking spot for.” Pete winces, even though he’s said way cheesier things without wincing in the past, and mutters, “Sorry.”

They’re not even out of the school parking lot yet. Patrick feels very uncomfortable. It is… awkward. Things have never been awkward before. Not in this bitter, don’t-say-the-wrong-thing way.

Patrick blurts out the next thing he can think of, trying to wallpaper over the awkward with small talk. “So where are you taking me in your rusty chariot?” Patrick had sort of just assumed they’d be going to Pete’s and maybe, like, sneaking into someone’s fancy apartment building to go swimming or something? The Jeep and the sleds make him think maybe not.

Pete’s face brightens. Patrick is so relieved. “Lake Geneva!” Pete announces. “They still have snow up there. We’re gonna sled, or snowboard if you want to, and there’s like an eternal bonfire and endless hot chocolate, and if we don’t want to eat our weight in s’mores we can go out to dinner! Our room has a fireplace, even.”

There are several elements of this sentence that require complex processing. Patrick, a serial kind of guy, turns all of his attention to the first one. “Lake Geneva _Wisconsin_?” You’re taking me across state lines?”

“What, do you not have your traveling papers? Did I not get the correct permit to transport Patricks?” Pete is smiling, but there’s an edge to him. It makes Patrick jumpy. They are all wrong, today—out of tune. Hitting discordant notes. Patrick can’t find the thread of the melody.

“Well, like, I told my parents I’d be at Joe’s is all.” Even as he’s saying it Patrick can’t tell why it would make a difference.

Pete’s smile is losing wattage. “Even if I’m your eighteen year old friend, they won’t let you hang out with me?”

“Overnight? Without supervision? Out of _state_? Pete, my mom won’t even let me use the house phone unsupervised after she—um—picked up on us that time.”

“I happen to be extremely trustworthy,” Pete complains. “Her suspicion wounds me.” Patrick’s not listening, though, because Patrick’s brain has just processed its way to the part where Pete said _our room_.

“Wait, sorry, did you say we have a room?”

“With a fireplace,” Pete adds cheerfully. Pete takes in Patrick’s perplexed face and tense silence. His face is like a field of daisies getting hailed on. He is trying to maintain his sunny cheer but he is just fucking getting _pummeled_. “Since I won’t get to talk to you for a week, I guess I thought we could, like, have a mini vacation… If you don’t want to, we can—”

“No! No,” Patrick interrupts. God, is he acting so _off_ that Pete thinks he doesn’t want to be around him? To be _alone in a hotel room_ with him? Patrick needs to get his shit assembled and put his game face on. Patrick remembers their last conversation, the last time Pete made a grand, invasive, spontaneous gesture. Yeah, okay, it wouldn’t be totally crazy if Pete thought Patrick didn’t want to be around him.

“I definitely want to.” Patrick makes sure to enunciate clearly, so there are no misunderstandings. “I’m just surprised. Which is, like, the point of surprises, right? This is cool. This is—sweet. You’re sweet.”

“Oh,” is all Pete says. He’s smiling again, hopeful and half-hearted. Patrick vows to be on his best behavior from here on out. For the first time Patrick thinks that Pete is someone, maybe, he needs to be careful with. That Pete is someone he can really hurt, without thinking, without meaning to. That Pete is not the one holding all the cards—that they’ve both got a hand, that sometimes they’ve both gotta play shitty cards.

Mostly, though, Patrick’s just thinking about how Pete got them a _hotel room_. He’s seen enough movies about high school to know what a hotel room means: Patrick Stumph is losing his virginity. Tonight.

Patrick has been reading a lot on the internet in preparation for this occasion, which he’s been hurting for pretty much since the first time Pete kissed him, and he’s feeling pretty knowledgeable about how dudes have sex with other dudes. There’s a lot on the internet, like too much, when you Google ‘how to have anal sex.’ Pete would have to try pretty hard to surprise him after _those_ search results, honestly. The human body holds no mysteries the penises of the internet have not plumbed.

So Patrick is a little nervous, maybe, but he feels— _ready_ to take this step, and there’s really no one he’d rather have his first time with than Pete. He’s also pretty sure things must be okay with him and Pete after all, or Pete wouldn’t have planned them a romantic weekend getaway. Whatever this weird atmosphere in the car is, maybe Patrick’s reading too much into. Maybe Pete just had a bad day. Maybe Patrick smells especially terrible and it’s super off-putting. Whatever. He doesn’t know. The point is, there are many possibilities.

“Um, so, about Monday night,” Patrick says. He’s planning to apologize for being a jerk, for asking Pete to leave, for not following him and trying to fix things. When you live far apart and don’t know when you’ll see each other again, Patrick has decided, it is a really shitty thing to say goodbye angry. Or, actually, to say ‘get out’ and then watch the other person stomp out of your life without either of you saying goodbye at all. That is peak shittiness right there.

But Pete gets there first. “Yeah, I was an asshole. I do that. Like, most of the time.” Pete stares dead ahead while he says this, eyes fixed on the road like they’re going 90 mph up an icy, winding mountain road during a snow hurricane and not cruising gently through the suburbs. “Sooner or later you’ll get sick of hearing it, but I’m sorry.”

“No, Pete—”

“Can we just, like, not talk about it?” Pete’s voice comes out hot and unexpected. His knuckles on the steering wheel are white.

A long silence stretches out before them. It feels miserable. Finally Pete turns on the CD player. “Here,” he says, sounding embarrassed. “I made you a mix.”

It starts with the Lion King song, the one Pete busted a kidney laughing about while Patrick sang for his entertainment. Then there’s Elvis Costello. It unfolds into a funny, thoughtful blend of songs they’ve played together, songs Pete’s heard that he thinks Patrick would like, and songs by artists featured on Patrick’s bedroom walls that Pete has included purely so he can mock them. Patrick relaxes into it. Music, and the devotion Pete expressed by assembling this music, is something Patrick can feel comfortable inside. Something he can feel sure of. Soon, they’re singing, smiling. The air loosens and becomes easier to breathe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tired and crabby from choosing an insurance plan--I swear to god they don't WANT you to understand what those words mean--but so, so happy to be here with you all thinking about Peterick.


	19. Chapter 19

When they get to Lake Geneva, Pete is too excited to go sledding to check into their room at the Abbey. They put on their snow gear in the parking lot at one of the slopes and they’re off. Red-faced, laughing, cold, snowy, out of breath: all becoming adjectives on Patrick. Pete tackles him into the snow at least four times; he can’t help himself. Patrick shoves handfuls of snow down the neck of Pete’s coat in retribution. You would be surprised how fucking cold a nipple ring gets when you repeatedly throw snow on it. There are snowballs and snow wrestling and Patrick makes a snow angel, even though Pete tells him he already is one. Patrick kisses warmth back into Pete’s snowy lips and everything Pete feels, everything Patrick doesn’t want him to say, boils up inside of him, desperate to come out.

Pete throws himself down the hill to escape it. The sled hits a block of ice and he’s airborne; the sled goes on its merry way and Pete wipes out, getting a faceful of snow and a bloody lip. He lies on his back panting and laughing in the snow until Patrick appears above him.

“We look like we got in a fistfight,” Patrick says, gesturing to the fading bruise around his eye and Pete’s bleeding mouth.

“Good thing we’re going to a fancy restaurant!”

They pack it in when the hill gets too dark to really see where they’re going, and when Patrick’s soaked jeans start to fuse into denim-and-leg-hair popsicles. They’re wet and freezing, so they go to the hotel to clean up before dinner.

Pete is extremely gratified by the way Patrick gapes around the lobby. The Abbey is big and cozy, like a rich person’s log cabin—homey wooden furniture with velvet cushions, rustic fireplaces setting off the crystal chandeliers. “You took me somewhere _nice_!” Patrick accuses, in the exact same voice he used the time Pete picked him up at Union Station wearing a hoodie and a tie. Pete can’t stop grinning. He’s feeling like maybe things will work out after all. Maybe he can live with ‘friends.’ Maybe friends is _better_ , even. Uh, somehow. He doesn’t look at it too hard, he just tries to enjoy the feeling.

Their room is big and plush and warm: thick red bedspreads, gold fixtures, a roaring fire. Pete hopes it’s not too romantic, not too much. He just wanted—he just wanted to do something nice. To make up for being less than. He doesn’t have a good read on appropriate intensity levels. Like, he gets the sense throwing a city-wide parade in honor of his affection for Patrick would _probably_ be excessive, but where does taking him to Lake Geneva fall on the Appropriate Ways to Express Sincere Fondness scale? Pete doesn’t even have a _copy_ of that scale, so how can he possibly use it to measure his efforts?

“Wow!” Patrick is spinning in a circle in the middle of their room. When he’s made himself sufficiently dizzy, he flops pink-cheeked and smiling dazedly onto one of the beds. Beyond their balcony, the all-night bonfire crackles beckoningly in the courtyard. It is a deeply nice moment. “Finally, I can enjoy the benefits of having a sugar daddy!”

“Yeah, my stock options at FootLocker are, like, killer.” Pete flops onto a bed of his own and beams at the vaulted, chateau-style ceiling. “So there are two dinner options and one is entirely s’mores—” he starts.

“Hey,” Patrick interrupts. He’s frowning over at the bed Pete is on, as if noticing for the first time it’s not the same one he is on. “They gave us two beds.”

“I asked for two beds,” Pete says, before he can think better of it.

“You won’t share a bed with me?” Patrick’s pouting, playful, but the creases in his forehead indicate this mood could sour at any moment. Pete pulls himself into a sitting position, hugs his knees to his chest, unconsciously trying to present a smaller target.

“I wanted everybody to have their own space,” Pete says carefully. “Like, in my apartment there’s not really another option. But here we could have another option, so… I took it.”

Pete’s not sure what the right answer was, but it wasn’t that. It is so obvious _now_ , a mouthful of words too late, that it wasn’t that.

“So it’s not that you _won’t_ share a bed with me, it’s that you don’t want to? If there’s another option?”

“What? No! I don’t know!” Pete can sense the situation getting away from him, fast, but he’s not sure what he’s done or how to undo it. He’s trying to be _nice_. He’s trying not to make assumptions. He’s trying to be Patrick’s _friend_ with optional awesome benefits without making Patrick feel uncomfortable, and he does not understand why he is so, so bad at doing that. Or why Patrick only seems to like him if he’s making him uncomfortable. “We can share if you want! I just—”

“So, like, you don’t want to have sex with me,” Patrick says, which frankly is a _laughable_ misread of what Pete wants and does not want.

“Patrick, I’m not having sex with you while you’re sixteen,” Pete says. He feels like he’s being very patient, but Patrick looks like he wants to punch Pete in the face. “Like, that’s it. It’s very straightforward. Whether I _want_ to doesn’t even enter into it.”

Patrick grabs a decorative pillow and whips it at Pete with serious force. It hits him directly in the face and hurts more than you’d think, given his already split lip. “Why’d you bring me here, then?” Patrick demands. “Why do you pick up kids at shows if you’re, like, too condescending and ageist to sleep with them?”

“ _Condescending_?” Pete’s anger is flickering to life beneath the surface. He does not like the angry part of him. The only thing fire’s good for is burning, and Pete’s been burnt enough. “Patrick, this is like, an ethical, legal dilemma. And I don’t just go around ‘picking kids up at shows!’ Can you give me, like, _any_ credit here? You are—you are so fucking special to me! I’m just trying not to fuck you up!”

Patrick is on his feet, hands in fists. For a second Pete thinks Patrick really is going to hit him. The words Pete is saying are rolling off him. He’s so angry there’s no way to reach the reasonable part of his brain. “So like, what about when I’m seventeen?” Patrick demands. Pete can’t believe Patrick is hostilely demanding, like, a firm date commitment for when Pete will deflower him. Does he make appointments on the quarter-hour? This is not fun or romantic or sexy. This feels _gross_. Pete is not a goddamn stud pony. He was not put on this earth to—to _devirginize_ high schoolers.

Pete covers his face with his hands, just so he can take a breath without looking at this crazy beautiful psychopath distorting his thoughts and making him say certain choice words he will not mean but will not be able to retract anyway, because saying a thing is a meaningful act that you can’t take back and it doesn’t matter whether you meant the words; once they hit the air they take on their own lives, and the other person’s wounds take on their own meaning.

Listen: Pete wants to have sex with Patrick. _Of course_ he wants to have sex with Patrick. But Patrick is impossible and golden and pure. Patrick might actually be the source of all magic, rainbows, and sunshine. Now that he’s heard what Patrick thinks of him, Pete doesn’t know how okay he is with being the random creepy older dude, the friend-with-benefits advantage-taking scumbaron who uses up Patrick’s virginity just because he _wants_ to. Pete’s own first time was—does not bear thinking about. He would scrub it off his history if he could, but bodies do not work like that. Bodies are temporary records of permanent damages. You carry scars and silences and inked-in reminders every day until you decay. Pete kind of wants Patrick’s first time to be special. Like, the opposite of Pete’s. With someone Patrick, you know, loves.

Because when he looks at Patrick it’s like being whole for the very first time in his life. It’s like breathing with two lungs when you’ve only had one for as long as you can remember up until that moment. Pete is crazy, stupid in love with this kid, and he had no idea that _anything_ could feel so good or so right. He never believed in soulmates, until—

And Pete wants Patrick to find that person. Whoever that person, for Patrick, might be.

It’s not Pete. Patrick already made it pretty clear it’s not Pete. That even the idea of loving Pete is like, this big fucking punchline. Pete loves this kid, and this kid doesn’t love him back, and he just think Patrick deserves to feel—well. Deserves better than him, anyway.

“That is a difficult question to answer,” Pete says, and he knows even before he says it that it’s going to go poorly, but he doesn’t know what else he can say that’s honest without being too honest. Without being what Patrick has repeatedly warned him not to talk about. Pete can barely think about what Patrick means to him and the absolute wreckage of his heart in light of him not meaning that back to Patrick—Pete can barely fit the thoughts in his head without getting a nosebleed, without passing out—so he certainly doesn’t know how he can get it into words, into the _right_ words, so Patrick understands him without ending up hurt or angry. Pete doesn’t even know how to tell Patrick that he loves him without doing damage, anymore. Pete is a fucked-up hand grenade with a pulled pin and he is so, so worried Patrick’s gonna get caught in the blast.

“I am really fucking sick of you acting like you’re so much smarter and wiser and better than me, Pete Wentz!” Patrick marches right up to him, yelling, and grabs him by the collar with one hand and stabs his chest with an outstretched finger with the other. If this moment wasn’t so hideous, it would be incredibly hot. “Like, if you think it’s easy being with you, it’s not! I have to sneak around and lie and bribe my little sister; I can’t introduce you to my friends or family, not really; it’s not like I can have you as my boyfriend or even go to my stupid fucking prom; and I never know when I’m going to run into one of your super sexy exes or who you hook up with at your shows or when you’re going to drop off the grid and stop returning my messages because you’re like, too fucking sad to take a shower and you need one of your many sex pals to come _rescue_ you! You are not fucking easy to be around, okay? You are actually kind of—really goddamn impossible!”

Honestly, Pete would have preferred the punch in the face. Patrick gathers his breath and lands the killing blow. “So now that I find out you won’t even have _sex_ with me in, like, a romantic fucking hotel room, when that has been the whole _thing_ the whole _time_ —well—what the fuck am I to you, then? What are we even _doing_ here?”

“So to clarify,” Pete says, “you’re mad that I’m _not_ using you for sex?”

Patrick just stares at him like he’s the world’s biggest asshole. Patrick is totally right. “Like, you can go to prom, Patrick.” Everything coming out of Pete’s mouth is terrible. He’s still reeling from the verbal blows. His brain hasn’t come all the way back online yet, and anyway he’s always been short a few essential neuronal connections.

“I don’t want to go to _prom_ ,” Patrick spits with maximum sarcasm. “It’s on my birthday weekend. I _wanted_ to spend that night having sex with _you_. Asshole.”

“You _just said_ you didn’t want to miss your prom.” Pete is stuck on this one, stupid thing. It’s the only part of Patrick’s massive, excruciating diatribe he knows how to respond to. “You’re definitely not fucking missing your prom because of me. I want you to, like, be a kid. Have normal developmental experiences. Just because I’m not in high school doesn’t mean _you_ don’t get to be in high school. Like, I got to do all that stuff already, and I made a fucking mess of it, and… and it’s important, to me, that you get to do it too.”

“ _I assure you_ , I can just go to prom next year!” The kid has _impressive_ pipes. Singing, yelling in Pete’s face, whatever. The notes this kid would hit during sex—! But now he’s got Pete thinking about it too. Pete already _knows_ what notes Patrick hits when he comes, for good or for ill. Pete will be living on those memories for the rest of his miserable, Patrick-less life, probably. If they continue self-destructing at this rate.

“Why’s that, Patrick? ‘Cause you’ll be done with me by then? All obstacles to the perfect prom removed?” Pete’s yelling too, all of a sudden. Sarcasm burns his throat like bile. It feels _good_ , to let go of the hurt that’s been festering since Monday, even if it means flinging it at Patrick. It just feels good to be getting it _out_ for once, instead of carrying it around like a complete set of sharpened cutlery in his knife block of a gut, ready and waiting for him to fall over on and eviscerate himself with. “The more shit you say, the more it seems like all your problems would be solved if you just dated a high schooler instead! Oh, wait—I fucking _forgot_ —we’re _not dating_ , we’re just _friends_ , I’m just the creeper you picked up to get your obnoxious fucking _virginity_ out of the way, you and Joe think it’s real fucking funny how I can’t keep the feelings out of fucking, how the prospect of caring about me is absolutely slap-your-knee _hilarious_ , isn’t that right? I guess I just got fucking _confused_ because I’ve been spending every free minute talking to you or thinking about you or hanging out with you, because I’m not supposed to see anyone else! Maybe it’s a good fucking thing you’re leaving the country—maybe I’ll finally be able to get my head straight without you always being around!”

Pete’s as surprised as anyone when the words stop. It’s like he’s paralyzed, throat open, body taking over—like he’s puking, getting the poison out. Well, it’s out now. He feels totally raw, scraped out, empty down to the pit of his stomach.

Patrick’s looking at him like—Pete doesn’t know what. Like Patrick doesn’t know him, maybe. Or something worse. Like Patrick is seeing him for the first time and realizing he doesn’t _want_ to know hm.

Well. He always knew it was only a matter of time before he fucked this one up, too. He’s Pete Wentz. It’s what he does.

He’s fucking _working_ on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ow ow ow ow ow, I am sorry.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY I MISSED YESTERDAY! I am the worst. And busy. But mostly the worst. Here is some more pain!

 

Paris in the spring. Rainy streets, blossoming trees, architecture so striking even the Nazis couldn’t bring themselves to blitz it. Fashionable people, incredible food, parks and monuments and museums bursting with beauty, with history, with art. With the brilliant audacity of human creation.

The city of fucking light, and all Patrick can think about is Pete.

He is sure, he is _one hundred percent sure_ , that there are hordes of cute Parisians he could kiss instead of Pete Wentz. Hell, there are probably at least two people in French Club he could kiss instead of Pete Wentz.

He wishes he wanted to.

They go to Versailles, and Patrick thinks about Pete telling him he shines brighter than the Sun King. He searches the Hall of Mirrors and never finds Pete’s reflection. They go to Le Soufflé and Patrick thinks about the Feast of Chips Pete made him and the dinner they never ate in Lake Geneva because Patrick had Pete drive him home instead. They go to the Tuileries gardens and Patrick thinks of the two roses Pete bought him in a dirty train station. They climb to the top of Notré Dame and Patrick wants to fling himself from the highest spire because he’s so fucking tired of thinking about Pete.

 

 

Pete Wentz, Noted Train Wreck, has just blitzed the best thing he’s ever had in his life. It’s his signature move. This time, he gets the feeling he’s outdone himself—lost something more precious than he can even see from here. Patrick was a prism, refracting Pete’s life into so many light, colorful directions. Now Patrick is gone and Pete’s got nothing to look forward to but grey.

If he had taken a minute, just one fucking minute, to sit down and _realize_ how much he loved Patrick, if he had _cared_ enough to know, if he had stopped thinking about himself and his own tedious hurt for half a heartbeat—

Mostly it’s to punish himself that he goes to Mikey. To punish himself, and because he really doesn’t know what he’ll do if he’s alone. A whole lifetime of possibility rendered into sand and flowing, flowing out between his fingers. He can’t hold onto any of it.

Mikey, he can hold onto.

“I lost your number,” he says when Mikey opens his door. “Couldn’t call ahead. Can I come in?”

“Asshole,” Mikey says. He walks away. But he leaves the door open behind him.

They’re a few beers in, sitting in companionable animosity on Mikey’s couch—neither of them knows what the fuck to do with Pete—before Mikey speaks to him. “You break up with your underage boyfriend, then?” It doesn’t even sound mean, the way he says it. Pete appreciates that.

Pete sighs the whole damn world off his chest and lets his head flop back off the couch. He studies the ceiling as if it holds any kind of answer. “I don’t know. He didn’t want to date me. He wanted someone his own age, I think.”

“I’m not gonna say you didn’t deserve it,” says Mikey after a while. Pete’s got no argument.

“I made it six days,” Pete tells him, after the first six pack has fallen into the recycling bin and the second six pack starts sending reinforcements in after it. “Before I came looking for you.”

“What’s that, a new record? And here’s me without any trophies to smack you with.”

“No, I just mean… I _am_ trying. I heard you, at the store.”

Mikey props his chin on his hand and squints at Pete. “Everyone in the entire grocery heard me, Pete. I kinda went off.”

“Yeah, but I _listened_. I tried to listen.” Pete opens another beer, hoping it will help him explain better. “I wouldn’t be here if… if Patrick fuckin’ Stumph wasn’t a national _emergency_.”

Mikey eyes Pete for a long moment. Then he burps. “So are we gonna have sex, or…?”

“Are you gonna yell at me about it the next time I come to Mariano’s?”

“Dude, you just have to stop shopping at Mariano’s. I’m serious.”

“I like Mariano’s,” Pete protests. Mikey just stares at him, like _are you fucking serious right now_.

“Okay,” Pete decides at the end of his beer. “Let’s have sex.”

 

 

It’s funny, but Paris without Pete doesn’t feel like Paris at all. There’s no _magic_. Patrick is pretty sure Paris is supposed to be magic. Instead it’s just a place—streets, shops, world-famous works of art, monumental feats of architecture, whatever whatever. Patrick is trying his very fucking hardest to forget Pete Wentz ever existed, and it is going so poorly it’s almost kind of amazing.

It’s about this time Patrick starts to realize that Pete Wentz might have been the best thing in his life. If he can’t even see _Paris_ in color without Pete… what chance does the rest of the world have? What chance does stupid Glenview have?

Patrick doesn’t want to live in black and white.

It is strictly forbidden, using the hotel room phones to place calls, local _or_ international, but especially international. Patrick comprehends the seriousness of this rule. Patrick doesn’t even know what he’d _say_ , if he called Pete. He was so unhappy, on the drive home from Lake Geneva, that he just pretended to sleep until he actually fell asleep. The last thing he said to Pete was, _why can’t you just be normal for one minute? How are you ever supposed to fit into my life, when you’re so… so…?_

He hadn’t even finished the question. He knows that the blank he left hanging at the end sort of encompassed _all_ of Pete. He knows that this is shitty. The thing is, though, he’d meant it. He had. But he’d meant it more like, he _wanted_ Pete to fit into his life. He just hadn’t see how that could possibly happen, with Pete being so impossible, with the gulf of misunderstanding between them, with the things he’d said in anger being true, with love really not being enough to subvert consent laws or five years’ difference in age. It isn’t like Pete, a twenty-two year old, can just… be his boyfriend. Patrick doesn’t want to wait, like, another year before he can even _tell_ people about Pete without lying, another like _five_ years before it stops being aggressively creepy.

The whole situation cannot support itself, under the weight of its own improbability, the technical difficulties in its execution, the requisite suspension of common sense and adherence to widely accepted ethics and, most importantly, disbelief. The thing with Pete only worked if it was meaningless. If it’s sincere, if it’s the real thing, it turns into a beached whale. It can’t even inflate its own lungs on land, let alone hold up its vast skeleton, let alone keep itself alive. It can only survive in the murk, the dark undersea shadows.

Patrick has the hotel phone pulled into his lap. He’s staring at the keypad and thinking about how his love life is like a _whale_. It is so fucking stupid. In fact, it probably can’t get any stupider. So why the hell not?

He calls Pete.

 

 

Pete and Mikey lie on their backs on Mikey’s bed. It’s a familiar set-up. Pete’s body cools as his sweat dries. It’s a cold March. It’s raining without mercy outside Mikey’s window, turning the last of the snow into gross mud that will clog the gutters, choke dead lawns, and get Pete’s sneakers dirty.

Being with Mikey makes Pete feel nothing at all.

“Did that cheer you up?” Mikey asks, rolling onto his stomach, smiling at Pete. It’s a charming smile. It makes Pete wish, almost, that he could’ve made him and Mikey work. Now that he knows Patrick exists, though, he understands why all of his other relationships have been disasters. They had to be. They were all just paving the rocky-ass road to this one perfect, impossible, golden kid. The kid Pete was made for. All these years he thought his heart was defective, it was really just tuned to a frequency that only Patrick can play.

“Not really,” Pete confesses. Mikey flops onto his face. Mikey’s probably pretty fucking tired of Pete’s confessions.

“Thanks, man.” Mikey’s voice is sarcastic, but there’s no bite to it. He’s not really mad. Pete has done all the damage he can ever do to this one. In a weird way, that makes Mikey impervious to any and all of Pete’s bullshit. Which actually really takes the pressure off. “You’re always so good for my self-esteem.”

“You know me,” Pete says. “I do what I can.”

Pete feels hollow inside. Ever since he spewed his guts out at Patrick, he’s been trying to fill that cavity in his chest with other things—writing, video games, Mikey, beer, even work. Nothing touches him. Maybe he’s a ghost. Maybe the further he gets from the real part of his life, the part of it he spent with Patrick, the more he’ll just… disappear.

Mikey lifts his face enough to squint at Pete. “Dude, are you like _pining_ right now? While you’re lying next to me? I feel very disrespected.”

“You know me,” Pete repeats, making sure to really enunciate the self-loathing this time.

“You idiot. You’re in love with him, aren’t you? You came _here_ and fucked _me_ and you’re actually _in love_ with that fucking cherub you brought to my goddamn store, aren’t you?”

Pete’s miserable silence says it better than words could.

“Are you, like, actually trying to make yourself feel worse? Because you _know_ doing this, with me, is _not_ going to make being in love with some kid _better_! If you were anyone but you I wouldn’t even fucking believe this.”

“Like you’re so wise, Mr. Keeps Fucking the Ex He’s Still Fucked Up About,” Pete grumbles. Mikey is nailing him to the wall right now. He feels uncomfortable, being so transparent. There are many downsides to being a ghost. It’s like the only thing he’s haunting is himself.

Isn’t that fucking apt.

“At least I’m not _in love with you_ ,” Mikey shoots back. He’s got Pete there.

In the other room, where Pete left his pants, Pete’s phone rings and rings and rings.

He doesn’t hear it.


	21. Chapter 21

Somehow, without meaning to, Patrick has asked a girl to prom.

It was their last night in Paris. French Club was wandering along the Seine, which was lit up to tremendously romantic effect. This girl who went to a lot of the same shows as Patrick, who had kind of been his Paris buddy since Joe, a German student, obviously could not come on this trip—they were walking together, they were laughing, they had in-jokes from the trip, her eyes were a fletched green and they looked nothing like Pete’s, and Patrick heard himself say, “So would it be unforgivably uncool if I asked you to prom right now?”

Sam gave him a calculating look. “Probably,” she said. “Especially given my current romantic situation. But… I’d say yes.”

So now Patrick’s got a passport and a prom date and no use for either, and when he called Pete from the hotel for the cost of $18 and much chaperone yelling, he didn’t even have the guts to leave a message. Basically, everything totally sucks.

Joe tries to cheer him up. He drags Patrick to a basement show that weekend. Patrick jumps at every hoodie, has a heart attack over every dark-haired boy in eyeliner. It does not exactly take Pete off his mind. He doesn’t even hear the music; it’s all just a wash of sound. Enjoyment of music is another thing that’s taken a hit, post-Pete. Can’t see color, can’t feel music, can’t taste food. Patrick would not recommend love _or_ loss to anyone.

It transpires that he didn’t need to worry about Pete being in the audience, though, because in their second set the band introduces him onstage. “By popular demand, guest bassist and Chicago Casanova Pete Wentz!”

The rest of the world turns to static. Pete in the center of this spiraling fucking galaxy is the only thing that makes sense, the only thing Patrick’s eyes can focus on. Pete’s beautiful up there, dressed all in black. His hoodie says _Love Won’t Save You_ in iron-on letters. It looks like he stuck them on himself. He’s not even trying to smile. He just keeps his eyes on his bass, keeps his head down, and plays. Patrick thinks—hopes—he kinda looks sad. Like, a level of upset falling between ‘Panera’s out of broccoli cheddar soup’ and ‘my dog ran away.’ Like, possibly mildly heartbroken.

“I thought you could talk to him!” Joe shouts to be heard. Joe, once so loyal, has turned out to be an utter traitor. Patrick can never trust him again.

“Absolutely fuck yourself!” Patrick yells back. You can’t walk across burned bridges; that’s the whole point of burning them. Pete hasn’t called him. Looking closer, Patrick’s pretty sure he sees Mikey W. up in the front, near the stage.

Patrick can’t talk to him. There’s nothing to say.

 

 

Time passes quickly, stickily, in unremarkable, unappealing globs. Patrick’s free time is totally lifeless without Pete to send dirty pictures to, to stay up into the night laughing and arguing with and singing to over the phone, to plan covert illegal meet-ups with. He stops buying minutes for his pay-as-you-go phone. What’s the point?

It’s prom before he knows it. Patrick can’t quite believe this was something he ever cared about, something he actually brought up in the stupid fight that ended him and Pete. Did they stop because Pete wouldn’t have sex with him? Because Patrick told Pete he loved him and then accidentally told Pete it was a joke? Because Patrick’s in high school and it was all just too fucked up? Because they’re both capable of saying incredibly hurtful things to the people they care for most, and really equally incapable of undoing it afterwards? Patrick doesn’t even know. All he knows is Pete hasn’t called him. Except for that expensive, abortive attempt in Paris, Patrick hasn’t called either.

Life is just passing time until you grow old and die, Patrick decides. Or until Pete Wentz calls you and you find the words to apologize. Whatever comes first.

(Death, probably. Yeah. It’s probably death.)

Patrick is getting ready for prom at Joe’s house and feeling whatever the perfect inverse of excitement is (dread? a sense of a foreshortened future? complete emptiness? something like that, anyway) and generally just doing the best he can when the limo shows up outside.

“I didn’t know you ordered a limo,” Patrick says to Joe.

“I didn’t,” Joe says to Patrick.

They go down, explain to the limo driver they did not order and cannot pay for a limo. The driver insists he has the right address, that he’s been paid in full. All he will say is that the car was hired for Patrick Stumph.

So they pick up the girls in a limo. They have to do pictures at each stop, with each set of parents. Patrick feels supremely uncomfortable in his stiff, tightly fitting formal wear and pasted-on smile. He hates the feeling of not wearing a hat. Sam, who looks cool but confusing in a tux instead of a dress, says, “Sweet ride.”

“Yeah, thanks for getting it for us,” says Patrick. “I feel dumb for only getting you this corsage.”

Sam puts on the corsage, looking awkward. “Um, Patrick? You know I’m going to prom with you as a friend, right?”

Patrick’s not keen on dating right now either, but still, ouch. Pete’s got Mikey, Joe’s making out with Marie already—Patrick wants _somebody_. “Pertinent to know prior to this moment,” Patrick mumbles, a joke only Pete would get. Lately his whole life is a joke to which Pete is the (absent) punchline.

No one’s laughing. Jokes aren’t funny without punchlines.

“The school wouldn’t let me go with my girlfriend,” Sam is explaining, her voice suggesting Patrick is being dumb. Patrick especially does not feel like laughing now. “So when you asked I figured we’d go, we’d have fun, and I could do the slow dances with Mona.” There is a long silence. Patrick does vaguely recall Sam talking an awful lot about someone named Mona on the trip. He was too busy thinking about Pete to really listen. He kind of just assumed she was like really blown away by the Mona Lisa? Fuck. Now that he’s trying, he can pretty distinctly remember referring to herself as _a big gay super-lesbian_ on at least one occasion. Possibly two. Maybe he _was_ concussed by that tennis ball he took to the face. Maybe he’s had a fucking brain bleed this whole time. It would explain some things.

“I feel especially bad saying this now,” Sam adds, “but I definitely didn’t get us this limo.”

 

 

It takes about eight seconds to determine that, yes, prom is dumb. Patrick can’t believe he came to this just to prove he could be normal without complicating, complicated Pete in his life. If that’s what he’s even trying to prove. Bringing a confirmed lesbian to prom doesn’t really scream ‘I’m Totally Over Pete Wentz,’ so he hopes that’s not what he was going for.

To her credit, Sam gushes about the decorations, tries to get Patrick into it. She is an entertaining dinner companion. Joe keeps eyeing Patrick expectantly, like he’s gonna make a move or something, but he’s not that desperate. It’s fine. Dinner is fine. This normal, expected developmental experience is not what Patrick thought it would be. That is all. He has no other thoughts. Zero. None. He _definitely_ has zero thoughts about Pete Wentz or the things he hoped they would be doing to each other and this particular night. _Less than_ zero, even. He’s definitely not thinking about how at 12:01 he’s going to turn into a seventeen year old fucking _pumpkin_ with exactly the same sexual and romantic prospects as Cinderella’s carriage. Listen: maybe his gay prom date will kiss his cheek or something. Thrill of the year, undoubtedly. For one wild second Patrick is gripped by insanity— _he’ll call Pete_ —before he remembers his cell phone is not only out of minutes, but also hidden in his dresser at home.

Finally, the meal ends. Patrick hopes this means he won’t have to talk to anyone for the rest of the evening, but Joe pulls him out onto the dance floor for the very first song, his date and Sam and Sam’s actual date making up the rearguard. Patrick can’t escape. He wonders how he never managed to notice Joe’s diabolical drive to inflict maximum suffering upon him before.

He dances painfully, awkwardly, longing for a hat to hide beneath more than ever. The band’s not great and the crappy dance music isn’t either. As soon as the song ends, he’s got an excuse on his lips. He’s trying to slink back to his seat, pleading a twisted ankle—Joe keeps trying to herd him back to the center of the dance floor—he’s getting so frustrated he’s going to dunk Joe in the fucking punch bowl the next time he gets in Patrick’s face, he doesn’t care if that’s an overreaction—when it happens.

“This song is for that person, the one you can’t believe is real when you first meet them ‘cause it’s easier to believe you dreamt them. This is for that person who shines like sunrise and lights up any room they’re in, the one who becomes the center of your universe at dawn’s first light because who wouldn’t want to be caught in their orbit. This is for that person who made you think, _oh shit, nothing’s ever gonna be the same again_ as soon as you saw them. It’s for best friends and girlfriends and boyfriends, for who you go home with and who you wish you were going home with, for whoever is your goodnight every night for the rest of your life, for that person all the songs are about. You know who they are. This song’s for them.”

Patrick will recognize that voice even from his grave.

In slow motion, he turns to face the band. Joe’s beaming like a lunatic. Patrick will never trust him again.

Grinning into a microphone, dressed in a powder blue fucking tuxedo, is Pete goddamn Wentz. Pete fucking Wentz is playing Patrick’s fucking _prom_. The universe isn’t folded enough for this to happen by chance. Pete orchestrated this somehow. _The limo_ , Patrick thinks stupidly, trying to make the pieces fit together in his flash-bombed brain. _The tux._

Pete points right directly at Patrick as the band launches into a pop-punk version of _I’ve Just Seen a Face_. Pete is smiling, singing to Patrick like the rest of the room is empty. Patrick has never seen him perform anything but hardcore, screamo. Further, Pete usually makes fun of Patrick for loving the Beatles. In March, on their disastrous trip, Patrick had belted this song with gusto in the car, and Pete had been too busy teasing him to sing a word. Apparently he does know them, though—the words.

 “You’re just the one for me and I want all the world to see we’ve met,” Pete sings. Pete is _dancing_ and it is _terrible_. Patrick is laughing so hard he can’t breathe. That may or may not be the only reason he’s breathless. “As it is I’ll dream of you tonight,” Pete sings.

Patrick is melting or dying or sublimating into a mist, he doesn’t know which. Possibly all three.

_I’m the one who’s dreaming,_ Patrick tells himself, watching Pete make a spectacular effort to dance like Elvis. This is the cheesiest, 80s-movie-est, sweetest fucking thing that has ever happened to anyone. It is logical to conclude that it can’t possibly be happening to _him_.

No one warned him how good Pete would look in a tuxedo.

Joe grabs Patrick firmly by the hand and drags him up to the band riser. It’s lucky he has Joe for locomotion, because right now all Patrick can do is gape and stare and gape some more. By the time the song is ending, Patrick stands in front of and eight inches below Pete, who is shimmying dramatically, so un-self-consciously ridiculous that it goes back around and becomes cool. Joe squeezes Patrick around the shoulders and disappears into the crowd. Pete finishes the song grandly, letting his bass hang and dropping to his knees, belting the last chorus up at Patrick.

Then the song is over. The band goes immediately into the next one, the actual lead singer taking over vocals. Now that he’s looking at them up close, Patrick doesn’t recognize any of the musicians. He doesn’t think they’re actually Pete’s band. Patrick is looking at anyone and thinking anything to buy himself time to process whatever has just happened, whatever might happen next.

“So?” asks Pete, on his knees, arms spread, never especially patient. “Did it work? Are you warm and fuzzy and completely weak in the knees and ready to forgive all my past misdeeds?”

“Is that what you’re going for?” Patrick is surprised that his voice even still works.

Pete gets up, shrugs out of his bass, and hops down to the dance floor. “As promised, I was hurt you didn’t ask me to prom. When I finally tried to call you—and I’m not proud of how long it took me to try—your phone didn’t work. So then I called Joe, and he told me you were taking some _girl_ , and I figured the only way I’d get to dance with you tonight was if I snuck in with the band. _Then_ I figured that if I made a really stupid, romantic, embarrassing gesture, you’d feel like you couldn’t turn me down. And I didn’t want to be turned down.” Pete’s confident smile flickers. He twists his hands in front of him, like he doesn’t know what to do with them if he can’t put them on Patrick and he’s not sure whether he’s allowed to do that. “So? Did it work?”

Patrick grabs Pete’s hands in his own without deciding to. Pete pulls Patrick close to his body—give him a hand, he’ll take your whole torso—and then all at once Patrick is slow-dancing with Pete Wentz in front of god and everyone at his junior prom.

With Pete’s cheek pressed against his own, the smell of Pete’s skin and shampoo and shaving cream rush Patrick all at once: a tide of weaponized sensuality. He almost staggers. He missed the smell of Pete with _physical force_. He can barely even comprehend what’s happening all through the rest of his body, in all the other places they touch.

“Are people staring?” Patrick asks, displaying his special gift for saying the precise words that will express the opposite of what he wishes to. He doesn’t know why none of the seventy billion things he _wants_ to say can’t find their way out of his mouth.

“Oh, right!” Pete breaks away all at once and Patrick nearly cries out at the loss, because that is the actual last thing in the world he wants to happen. He’d slow-dance with Pete until the universe exploded around them like fireworks and he still wouldn’t be ready to let go.

Before he’s even finished mourning, Pete’s grabbed something from behind the band riser and bounded back to him. “I know a boutonniere is traditional,” says Pete, “but I thought you’d like this better.”

He offers Patrick a hat. A fedora with a silk black band and a pink rose pinned to the brim. Patrick crams it onto his head without hesitation and immediately feels less scrutinized, more comfortable dancing. “ _Thank_ you,” he says. The words taste utterly inadequate.

“The suspense is killing me,” Pete says, making no move to return to bodies-pressed-together dancing. He holds Patrick’s hands in his own, keeps an arm-length between them. Patrick realizes they’re going to have to have a conversation about this whole fucking mess before he’s allowed to touch Pete’s body with his body again. It is a terrible price to pay. Couldn’t he just, like, trade in a few organs instead?

“I like you way too much to think of you spending your prom with someone else,” Pete says. He is staring into Patrick’s eyes without guile, without humor, with nothing but unflinching self-aware honesty. He has this stupid, sad-desperate smile on his face like he knows he’s digging his own grave but he just can’t help it, because this is Patrick. This is _his Patrick_.

Pete says, “Like, I can’t even handle the idea of you dancing with someone who isn’t me. Even when Joe told me you were taking a lesbian, I was jealous. I thought… I thought I wanted whatever was best for you, even though it’s not me. But what I realized is this: actually, I don’t want what’s best. Actually, when it comes to you, I am the most selfish man in the world. It turns out, Patrick, I only want you to be happy if it’s with me. So please, tell me—Patrick Martin Stumph, will you make me the happiest man in this part of the Milky Way and have me as your prom date?”

Patrick doesn’t care who’s watching, whether it’s his sexually active mother or the Age Police or every upperclassman from Glenbrook South. He steps into Pete, grabs hold of his lapels, and kisses Pete squarely on the surprised mouth. “I want to have you,” Patrick says, “for so much more than my prom date.” He fits himself snugly back against Pete’s body, slipping one hand around Pete’s waist and holding the other, steering them back into the dance. “I’ve been in love with you for, like, forever. It wasn’t a joke. I meant it. I was just so worried I couldn’t possibly mean the same thing to you that you meant to be. Like… fooling around was one thing, but why would someone like you want to _date_ a sixteen year old?”

Pete’s laugh is low and dark and uncurls through Patrick’s belly, vibrating down into his groin. Pete’s hand presses into the small of Patrick’s back and the weight of it makes him dizzy. “Because I’m someone like me,” Pete says against Patrick’s neck. Patrick kind of forgot, imagining him nonstop over the past few weeks, how overwhelmingly sexy he is in person. “Anyway, by my calculations, aren’t you a seventeen year old at midnight?”

Patrick can’t help himself. He catches Pete’s mouth in another kiss, this one more insistent, keen on making up for lost time. Pete kisses him back. In sixteen-almost-seventeen years, Patrick has never felt anything so good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY, you guys get something NICE for all your suffering. Next time: the very last chapter. UGH, YES, it's ending, and I'm heartbroken about it. You are all so lovely and supportive and you enhance my relationship with writing every day. <3


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys have been my best friends in the world throughout this process. Getting to write Peterick and then shriek about it with all you amazing, sweet, funny, supportive, repulsive about Patrick Stump individuals has been... maybe the most fun ever. There are so many things I want to write next, mostly for an excuse to hang out with you some more (and also because PETERICK). If you want to hang out in the meantime, I'm friendly and I like emails and I'm on tumblr as shark-myths. Hit me up with your headcanons and OTP prompts and lyrics meta, I am always interested in crying about Fall Out Boy.
> 
> This is the most fun I've ever had on AO3 and nothing is more fun and fulfilling than writing fic in a community like this. (Writing this has reminded me so much of my old home on AFIslash. This is the highest compliment.) Thank you, thank you, thank you. Words do not adequately express how wonderful you guys are, and I've usually got a lot of words. I hope to see you again soon. <3 <3 <3

Pete has never felt anything so good.

“ _Fuck_ do I love you,” he says, the first time he has ever told Patrick this, definitely using all the appropriate, traditional words of romance. He’s running his hands over Patrick’s skin, _all_ of Patrick’s bared skin. Nothing has ever been softer, sweeter, more awfulgood heart attack thrilling.

The time is 12:01. Technically, it is April 27. Technically, Patrick is seventeen—the legal age of consent in Illinois. Pete has become very, very interested in technicalities in his predatory old age.

They have elected to skip the prom afterparty.

“I can’t believe I finally get to do this.” Pete is so reverent, standing here naked in front of the marvelous ivory and rosebud form of an equally naked Patrick, that his voice comes out barely louder than his breathing.

“Do what? Did I not tell you I’m saving myself for marriage?” Now that he knows it’s happening, Patrick has started teasing Pete. This is probably revenge for Pete’s tyrannical above-the-waist rule. Pete cannot let Patrick know how adorable-frustrating this is, or he’ll never stop talking and let Pete kiss him.

“Shit, put your pants back on and let’s get to the chapel, then,” Pete says. He moves towards Patrick slowly; Patrick backs up so Pete can’t quite bring their bodies together, an invisible barrier between them like two magnets all wrong for each other. Patrick eases himself down backwards onto the futon and Pete follows, keeping himself supported over Patrick so still there is that space, still they aren’t touching. After so much waiting, all the places his body _isn’t_ touching Patrick’s are on fire. Pete is made of burning.

Pete can’t begin to believe how lucky he is. He’s sure he never did anything to deserve this, to deserve Patrick. He can’t believe he gets to have him. No one has ever been luckier than Pete Wentz. This kid, this _fucking kid_. Words cannot. Patrick Stumph is a meteor sent to destroy the planet in general and Pete in particular. Patrick is a constant heart attack. Patrick is celestial, pure sunshine, made of gold. Loving Patrick is probably definitely going to kill him. He’s not complaining. What a hell of a way to die.

“That’s a dangerous bluff with me,” Pete murmurs, holding his mouth a bare inch above Patrick’s, the vibration of his breath hitting Patrick’s lips. It is all he can do to stop himself from devouring this kid. He will not be able to stop himself for long. “We’d be married already if I had things my way. We’d run away together and I’d never, ever let you go.”

Patrick smiles up at Pete. He looks so, so happy. “Still too young for that. Ask me in a year.”

Okay, that’s it. Pete’s mouth falls on Patrick’s; Patrick arches off the mattress, pressing his chest to Pete’s, grabs Pete by the hips and pulls his pelvis down too. Just this, this naked full-body kissing, this is enough. Pete’s hard-on can probably be seen from space. He is so fucked up desperate for this incredible Patrick, his unbelievable Patrick.

And he doesn’t have to wait anymore.

Pete about dies when Patrick moves under him, cock rubbing against cock. His teeth close on Patrick’s lip by reflex. Patrick wriggles under him, digs his fingertips with bruising force into Pete’s hip, wraps a hand around the column of Pete’s dick with the other. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? Don’t need to do a cavity search, check me for a wire? How sure are we this isn’t a 21 Jump Street scenario?”

If Patrick has breath to tease him with, Pete’s not doing his job right. He licks his way down Patrick’s golden throat, raising goosebumps where he scrapes his teeth, and takes Patrick’s cock into his hand. God, the heat of it, the living, throbbing warmth. Pete will not survive this. Pete drags Patrick’s dick upwards, away from Patrick’s body with each stroke, gratified by the way Patrick’s hips lift helpless to follow. Pete moves his hips down to the meet them. Hands and hips, together they build a rolling rhythm. Staring down into them now, pale blond lashes fluttering, Pete has never noticed so much gold in Patrick’s eyes. Sunrise, sunrise. Patrick’s forehead scrunches in concentration, in pleasure; his eyes crease up. He bites his lip. His eyes open again, lock into Pete’s, his stare more intimate than anything the rest of their bodies can dream up. The time signature of the song their bodies are writing is changing, quickening, becoming more erratic to match their heartbeats, their breathing.

“Please,” is all Patrick is saying now. “Please _please please please._ ”

“Please what?” Pete asks. His voice is ragged, low, hitching with the movement of Patrick’s hand. He has to be sure. Even now, he has to be sure.

“Please _fuck me_ , Pete Wentz!” Patrick too seems to be having trouble breathing, but that’s not going to stop him from being exasperated with Pete. “I formally issue my consent. Do what you will with me. Just, please, _get inside me_ , you jerk.” The insult catches on a moan, gets stretched out breathy, by Pete’s fingers pressing his perineum.

“If you’re sure,” Pete says into his ear, just to be mean. Pulling away, sitting up to fumble in his futon-side cabinet for condoms and lube, is nearly impossible. Everything in him, every _molecule_ , clamors to be closerclosercloser. He’s seep into Patrick’s skin if he could. It still wouldn’t be close enough. He overrides every screaming instinct to pull away.

But then he’s back, and it’s worth it.

“Don’t you dare ask if I’m sure again,” Patrick warns, panting, before Pete even thinks to. So Pete doesn’t. Carefully, watching Patrick’s face closely for fear or pain or anything, anything that might imply _no_ , Pete pushes a lubed finger into him. Patrick goes still, then relaxes, _hot_ and tight and moving against Pete’s hand. Pete’s hand moves back, pressing, seeking; in the meantime he’s still stroking Patrick’s cock, all velvet and vein. Patrick looks up at Pete with heavy lidded eyes and nods. Pete adds another finger. Patrick emits a small, soft sound, and reaches up to pull Pete’s mouth down to his.

Patrick kisses up into Pete’s mouth like it’s his last night on earth, just like Pete said he wanted to, weeks ago over the phone, around the time Pete started to realize Patrick would absolutely be the death of him. It is hot and sweet at once. Patrick’s stroking Pete’s dick faster now, with urgency; Pete feels his impatience in his hand, in his kiss.

Patrick puts the condom on him with extreme precision and care. Pete can tell he hasn’t done it before and this is enough to make him hesitate. “Don’t you dare,” Patrick hisses again, hand tightening around Pete’s cock like a threat. “It’s ethically dubious but it is _not_ illegal. It’s a… birthday present. The best possible birthday present.”

“You love me? Really really?” Pete asks. Pants. It seems important before they do this. He’s tired of liminal spaces. He can’t survive in them. Liminal oxygen is less breathable than the real thing. Just because he’s _willing_ to slowly asphyxiate if it means he can stay at Patrick’s side doesn’t mean he wants to. Like, it would not be his preference.

“Love, marriage, joining a death cult, whatever,” Patrick moans. “I would agree to anything right now, Pete, just—please!”

There. It hits a melodic note, the moan, and Pete will have to be satisfied with Patrick’s consent, because he needs this _now_ , he is a tidal wave held in check for months too long, and he can’t hold back anymore.

It sounds cheesy, but sliding into Patrick feels like coming home. The full, deep fit of him—the way Patrick moves, from his pelvis to the crown of his head, a ripple of sensation traveling through his whole body—the golden look in his wide eyes—oh, Pete’s sure. Pete’s a goner. This is it. Patrick is _it_.

Their bodies start to move together, falling back into their earlier rhythm. Nothing has ever been better than this. Pete wants to spend the rest of his life here, inside Patrick, inside this moment. Patrick’s eyes keep fluttering closed with pleasure and Pete can’t stop watching him. It is a perfect moment. Pete is chasing a perfect prism of light.

Closer, closer. Feeling like he’ll burst his skin, if he tries to hold much more—touch. The way Patrick moves, is moving. The sounds he’s making, the sounds like singing. Pete knots his fingers in the sheet on either side of Patrick’s head. He kisses Patrick hard, trying to give himself something to hold onto, because he is _lost_ , he is drowning, he is erupting with this _moment_. When Pete comes, he swears he sees stars.

He comes, and his arms give out. He finds himself laying on top of Patrick. Patrick who is still hard, still moving against him. Pete’s whole body tender like a bruise, aching sweet. Pete slicks his hand with his own spit, reaches between them to find Patrick’s dick again, finishes him fast and rough with them both gasping. Then he buries his face in Patrick’s collarbone, wholly, molecularly satisfied, and dies happy.

 

 

In the morning Patrick wakes Pete up with a kiss and a plate of burnt Eggo waffles. “Will you go on a date with me?” Patrick’s asking, before Pete’s even really awake.

“Let’s go to the moon,” Pete suggests sleepily. “Hang you up among the stars. My sunrise.”

Patrick curls up next to Pete and bites into a waffle, getting crumbs everywhere, looking happy as anything. Looking radiant. Looking like the heat coming off the tail of a comet. Absolutely just glowing. Fucking cosmic. Pete’s gonna go blind, just from looking. Touching’s gonna burn him up. God, he can’t wait to burn.

“I thought we could go to the suburbs,” Patrick says. Pete just blinks at him. How can anyone be so _pretty_ , especially first thing in the morning with tangled-in-his-eyes hair, lips still looking swollen from the night before, waffle crumbs stuck to his mouth? This is the real crime, Pete thinks. Patrick existing in this black-and-white world. Every breath this kid takes is a revolution, a seismic remaking of Pete’s heart.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to space instead? Imagine having sex in space.” Pete doesn’t know why anyone would want to go to the suburbs. They are a terrible place.

“Hmm. Next weekend, maybe. Not to pull rank, but it’s my birthday, and I want to take you on a high school date.” Patrick stares innocently at Pete, says deadpan, “I’ve been told it’s important for me to have normal developmental experiences.”

“Okay, but about the sex,” says Pete. Not to be pushy, but he would really, _really_ like to do that again. Patrick leans forward, lips parted and eyes all dewy like he’s going to kiss Pete, Pete is so ready for this, and at the last second Patrick shoves a waffle in Pete’s mouth instead.

“You’d better eat something,” Patrick advises. “Gotta keep your strength up!”

They get a little off track showering. The shower prompts activities that necessitate another shower, and then they’re soapy and naked and wet together _again_ , and for a while they’re stuck in a lather-rinse-ravish-ruination-repeat cycle. By the time they make it to the train station they’re both stumbling drunk on each other and more than a little sore. Pete keeps gazing at Patrick with dopey adoration. It is well past noon. They both fall asleep on the train, heads tipped together, hands interlaced between them.

They walk to Patrick’s favorite pizza place in Glenview. Pete relishes the chilly breeze, because it makes Patrick huddle up against him. There is no place he’d rather be. Pete astonishes Patrick with the sheer volume of cheese and carbohydrates he is capable of demolishing; an escalating series of insults culminates in Patrick throwing a pepperoni that sticks to Pete’s cheek, leading to a brief, furious, in-booth wrestling match that makes their waitress sigh louder than Pete knew a person could sigh; they play arcade games until they run out of quarters. Pete likes to stand behind Patrick and put a hand in his back pocket while he plays _Street Fighter II_. He likes this, likes letting the world to see that this amazing, perfect Patrick is _his_ amazing, perfect Patrick. Likes to stand there like _look, this is where I belong_. Patrick finds his hand distracting. “You’re making me lose!” he keeps saying, as if this excuses his inferior street-fighting skills. “Give me another quarter!”

Even though it’s still too cold outside—Illinois in April is not any softer than frigid fucking March—Pete insists on buying Patrick ice cream. Patrick licks his cone in an exaggerated, dangerously sensual way. “You are making me so distracted and aroused I’m gonna trip into oncoming traffic,” Pete tells him. “I am actually going to die of this.”

“Ice cream was _your_ idea,” Patrick says, giving his wet pink lips a gratuitous lick. Pete makes an involuntary noise in his throat and gives up breathing forever.

Full unto death, they stop at the video store on the way home. They browse the aisles hand-in-hand. Pete keeps trying to pull Patrick behind the Adult Section curtain so he can make him blush with soft-core DVD covers and then kiss the flush from his cheeks into the rest of his skin. They kiss against a candy display until the put-upon clerk says plaintively, “Come on, guys.”

Pete is highly gratified by how embarrassed this makes Patrick. Unable to face the clerk again, he makes Pete rent the movies while he hides his face under the brim of his new hat outside the store. Pete rents Silence of the Lambs (so Patrick will think he’s brave and dashing, even though he knows he won’t be able to watch a second of it), Groundhog Day, and Jurassic Park.

As they walk home, Pete asks salaciously, wiggling his eyebrows as suggestively as possible, “So where am I sleeping tonight? Friends share beds at sleepovers, right? Just dudes being bros?”

“Yeah, me and Joe always spoon naked,” Patrick says sarcastically. Pete does not care for this joke. “But no such luck. When I called my parents this morning I told them you aren’t just my friend.”

“I’m also your deeply troubled nemesis? And it’s been prophesied you will one day vanquish me in a glorious rock battle to the death?” Pete’s mouth does this, starts making glib jokes at 827 miles per hour, when he cares a lot about the serious topic they’re discussing. He cares a lot about what Patrick told his parents about them. The next words out of Patrick’s mouth have the power to destroy him. He tries to think of another joke he can use to insulate himself from the seriousness of what Patrick might say next.

Patrick is familiar with this trick of Pete’s, though, and he punches Pete in the arm. “No, dork. I told them… you’re my boyfriend.”

Pete stops walking. “Am I?”

Patrick stops walking. “Aren’t you?”

Pete picks Patrick up and spins him around and kisses him on the mouth and grins his biggest, happiest smile up to the heavens, to which he owes a major debt of gratitude. “You are my Patrick and I am your Pete!” he hollers. Let the whole suburbs hear him. This, _this_ he hopes they print in the paper. This the world should know.

“Well, they aren’t that excited, actually. They’re… conflicted about it. They promised there are lots of super fun conversations we will have about Dating and Appropriateness when my birthday is over. So anyway, you’re sleeping on the basement couch, probably with a posted sentry and a motion-activated proximity alarm.”

“Alone?” Pete pulls his best pout. He knows it’s a good one. “I’ll get so _lonely_ alone.”

Patrick squeezes his hand. “Maybe I’ll visit you, then. I’d be a terrible host if I let my guests get lonely.”

That night, they make out straight through Silence of the Lambs and halfway through Groundhog Day, at which point Patrick’s little sister comes downstairs and announces, “You guys are gross. I’m telling Mom.”

They sit about three feet apart for the rest of the movie, linked only by their hands. The small circles Patrick makes on the back of Pete’s hand with his thumb are the sexual equivalent of anyone else’s tongue in his ear. Pete can’t hear a word that Bill Murray is saying because the whole _world_ is Patrick’s thumb, his entire _existence_ contained in its tiny revolutions. Pete keeps sending his foot over into Patrick’s space and poking him in the stomach with it and saying in a creepy voice, “Give me your face, Clarice,” because Patrick scowls and swats him away and says “Don’t!” really grumpily, and Pete loves this.

Not touching is almost as nice as touching is, really, because of the anticipation that springs up to crackle between them instead. Tonight, they’re watching movies in the suburbs, being good, cuddling chastely. Pete loves it. Pete can’t wait to see what next weekend brings; he already knows he’ll love that too.

Maybe Patrick will run away to the city with him someday. Maybe they’ll spend their whole lives watching movies and touching and laughing and singing. Maybe one day Pete will get to wake up every day with the sunrise beside him.

And maybe not.

Pete doesn’t know, not yet. But he’s here, now, with this glorious fucking Patrick. This very much _belonging to Pete_ Patrick. Pete wants all the rest—Pete wants _everything_.

But Pete has this, now. And Pete has never been so happy or so whole. He’s never been great at being patient, but he’s been working on it. For the rest, for now, for Patrick… Pete can wait.

 

 

 

_the end_


End file.
